ld fall off when we
did not know it, and be left in the road, and then I should not have
anything nice to wear when I reached my aunt's house. But the valise
went through all safe, and I had the satisfaction of wearing my best
dress every afternoon while I stayed; and I was foolish enough to think
a great deal of this.

On the fourth day after our arrival came a letter from my mamma, giving
me a great many directions how to behave, and enclosing this first
letter from Pussy. I carried both letters in my apron pocket all the
time. They were the first letters I ever had received, and I was very
proud of them. I showed them to everybody, and everybody laughed hard at
Pussy's, and asked me if I believed that Pussy printed it herself. I
thought perhaps my mamma held her paw, with the pen in it, as she had
sometimes held my hand for me, and guided my pen to write a few words. I
asked papa to please to ask mamma, in his letter, if that were the way
Pussy did it; but when his next letter from mamma came, he read me this
sentence out of it: "Tell Helen I did not hold Pussy's paw to write that
letter." So then I felt sure Pussy did it herself; and as I told you, I
had grown up to be quite a big girl before I began to doubt it. You see
I thought my Pussy such a wonderful Pussy that nothing was too
remarkable for her to do. I knew very well that cats generally did not
know how to read or write; but I thought there had never been such a
cat in the world as this Pussy of mine. It is a great many years since
she died; but I can see her before me to-day as plainly as if it were
only yesterday that I had really seen her alive.

She was a little kitten when I first had her; but she grew fast, and was
very soon bigger than I wanted her to be. I wanted her to stay little.
Her fur was a beautiful dark gray color, and there were black stripes on
her sides, like the stripes on a tiger. Her eyes were very big, and her
ears unusually long and pointed. This made her look like a fox; and she
was so bright and mischievous that some people thought she must be part
fox. She used to do one thing that I never heard of any other cat's
doing: she used to play hide-and-seek. Did you ever hear of a cat's
playing hide-and-seek? And the most wonderful part of it was, that she
took it up of her own accord. As soon as she heard me shut the gate in
the yard at noon, when school was done, she would run up the stairs as
hard as she could go, and take her place