t, and one for his dog. His own
staircase was very easy, with broad low steps, and two landings, though
the distance was very short from the first story to the second; but the
poor cat and dog must have had a hard time of it. The other two
staircases were so crooked it seemed as if the carpenter must have built
them in his sleep, and have had the nightmare to boot. Each step was set
at a different angle from the one below it; and they were high, and
steep, and dark--ugh! I don't like to think about them. I remember I
tried to send a moonbeam down the cat's stairs once, through a little
skylight over the landing; and the poor thing got lost and wandered
about for an hour before it could find its way back again. There's a
flight of stairs for you! and everything else in the house was just as
queer. There were large rooms and small rooms, long rooms and square
rooms; there were cupboards everywhere, you never saw so many cupboards
in your life. Some close to the floor so that you bumped your head in
looking into them, others so high up in the wall that nothing short of a
step-ladder could reach them; cupboards in the chimneys, and cupboards
under the stairs; yes, there was no end to them.

[Illustration]

Well, Jonas Junk furnished his house, and there he lived for many a
year, with his dog and his cat, and nobody else. All the ground about
the house he made into a beautiful garden, full of pear trees and apple
trees and all kinds of fruit trees. People used to say, by the way, that
the reason these apple trees were so crooked, was because they tried to
look like old Jonas himself; but I don't know how that was. Certainly,
Jonas was not a beauty, and I am sorry to say the boys were disposed to
make fun of him whenever he ventured out of his queer house into the
village. "But what has all this to do with mice and a mouse-trap, you
ask?" Patience! patience! we are coming to that very soon. I am an old
man, older than all of you and all your great-grandmothers put together,
so you must let me tell my story in my own way. If Jonas Junk had lived
on till to-day, his house would never have been turned into a
mouse-trap; but one dark night, you see, he fell down the dog's stairs
and broke his neck, and there was an end of him. For a long time nobody
lived in his house, and the garden was all going to rack and ruin, when
one fine day a gentleman from a neighboring town came to see the old
house and took a great fancy to it; and f