chariot miauls so dolorously that their
benefactor is sorely tempted to sit down and cry with them. But
amazement at their lack of appreciation is less than resentment at the
conduct of their grim, gray mother, Old Spotnose, who comes tearing
after in fierce pursuit and overtakes the rocking vehicle, whence she
snatches one of the wailing passengers by the scruff of its neck and
races back with her dangling burden to the woodshed. Determined to make
the remaining kittens happy, the child goes tugging and panting on, but
still there is heard that dreaded rush in the rear, and another,
another, another and yet another of those squallerkins is kidnapped.
Nothing is left at last but an empty doll-carriage, overturned among
the daisies and, deep within the sunbonnet, a puckered, crimson face
flowing with tears.

Throughout my childhood Old Spotnose continued to be an unsocial and
ungracious being. Perhaps annoyed by our persistent attentions to her
frequent families in the woodshed, she sought out all manner of
hiding-places from haymow to cellar. Memorable is the Sunday morning
when our mother lifted down the hatbox from her upper closet shelf and
looked in, her Sabbath expression completely destroyed, to find a
huddle of new kittens reposing in the crown of her best bonnet. The
sudden disappearances of these successive kitten groups were to my
slowly dawning apprehension first a mystery and then a horror. Old
Spotnose finally took to the woods, returning to the kitchen door for
food, a gaunt, half-savage creature, only under stress of icebound
weather. When we moved away from the village, she could not be found,
but one of my brothers, back for a visit the following summer, heard
that she had been seen skulking about the house and that kindly
neighbors had thrown meat and fish in her way. Carrying a basin of
milk, he went to a break in the barn foundations and, lying flat on the
ground, called and coaxed. Relenting toward humankind at the last, sick
Old Spotnose, hardly more than skin and bone, crawled out to him. She
would not taste the milk, but she lay against his knee for a while,
accepting his caresses; then dragged herself back under the barn to die
alone.

From that time to this, all my personal relations with cats have ended
in grief. One engaging kitten after another grew into romantic or
adventurous youth only to meet disaster. Perhaps our most heart-rending
experience was with Triptolemus, taken from his moth