Mr. Frank Wellington's house was an old-fashioned square wooden house, with a wide hall running straight through it from front to back; at the back was a broad piazza with a railing around it, and steps leading down into the back yard. Grape-vines grew on the sides of this piazza, and a splendid great polonia-tree, which had heart-shaped leaves as big as dinner-plates, grew close enough to it to shade it. This was where Mrs. Wellington used to sit with her sewing on summer afternoons; and she often thought that there couldn't be a prettier sight in all the world than Rosy Chapman running among the verbena beds with her long yellow curls flying behind, her little bare white feet glancing up and down among the bright blossoms, and half a dozen kittens racing after her. Rosy loved to race with them better than anything else; though sometimes she would sit down in her little rocking-chair, holding her lap full of them, and rocking them to sleep. But Johnny made a more serious business of it. Johnny wanted to teach them. He had read about learned pigs and trained fleas, and he was sure these kittens were a great deal brighter than either pigs or fleas could possibly be; so what do you think Johnny did? He printed the alphabet in large letters on a sheet of white pasteboard, nailed it up on the inside of the largest room in the cats' house, and spent hours and hours reading the letters over to the kittens. He had a scheme of putting the letters on separate square bits of pasteboard or paper pasted on wood, and teaching the kittens to pick them out; but before he did that, he wanted to be sure that they knew them by sight on the paper he had nailed up, and he never became sure enough of that to go on any farther in his teaching. In fact, he never got any farther than to succeed in keeping them still for a few minutes while he read the letters aloud. The cat that kept still the longest, he said, was the best scholar that day; he put their names down in a little book, and gave them good and bad marks according as they behaved, just as he and Rosy used to get marks in school.

After Johnny got all his flags up, the cats' house looked very pretty. It had four flags on it; one was a big one with the stars and stripes, and "Our Republic" in big letters on it; one was a "Garfield and Arthur" flag, which had been given to Johnny by the Garfield Club in Mendon; underneath this was a small white one Johnny made himself, with "Hurrah for Both" on it in rather uneven letters; then at two of the corners of the house were small red, white, and blue flags of the common sort. But the glory of all was a big flag on a flagstaff twenty feet high, which Uncle Frank put up for the boys. This also was a "Garfield and Arthur" flag, and a very fine one it was too. The kittens used to look up longingly at all these bright flags blowing in the wind above their house; but Johnny had taken care to put them high enough to be beyond their reach even when they climbed up to the ridgepole. They would have made tatters of them all in five seconds if they could have ever got their claws into them.

As soon as the kittens were big enough to enjoy playing with a mouse, or, perhaps, taking a bite of one, Mammy Tittleback returned to her old habits of mouse-catching. There had never been such a mouser as she on the farm. It is really true that she had several times been known to catch six mice in five minutes by Mr. Frank Wellington's watch; and once she did a thing even more wonderful than that. This Phil described to me himself; and Phil is one of the most exact and truthful boys, and never makes any story out bigger than it is.

The place where they used to have the best fun seeing Mammy Tittleback catch mice was in the cornhouse. The floor of the cornhouse was half covered with cobs from which the corn had been shelled; in one corner these were piled up half as high as the wall. The mice used to hide among these, and in the cracks in the walls; the boys would take long sticks, push the cobs about, and roll them from side to side. This would frighten the mice and make them run out. Mammy Tittleback stood in the middle of the floor ready to spring for them the minute they appeared. One day the boys were doing this, and two mice ran out almost at the same minute and the same way. Mammy Tittleback caught the first one in her mouth; they thought she would lose the second one. Not a bit of it. Quick as a flash she pounced on that one too, and, without letting go of the one she already had in her teeth, she actually caught the second one! Two live mice at once in her mouth! They were not alive many seconds, though; one craunch of Mammy Tittleback's teeth killed them both, and she dropped them on the floor, and was all ready to catch the next ones. Did anybody ever hear of such a mouser as that?

Another story also Phil told me about the kittens which I should have found it hard to believe if I had read it in a book; but which I know must be true, because Phil told it. One day, after the kittens had grown so big that they used to go everywhere, the children went off for a long walk in the fields, and four of the kittens went with them. When the children climbed fences the kittens crawled through, and they had no trouble till they came to a brook. The children just tucked up their trousers and waded through, first putting the kittens all down together in a hollow at the roots of a tree, and telling them to stay still there till they came back. They hadn't gone many steps on the other side when they heard first one splash, then two, then three; and, looking round, what should they see but three of those little kittens swimming for dear life across the brook, their poor little noses hardly above the water? It was as much as ever they got across; but they did, and scrambled out on the other side looking like drowned rats. These were Spitfire and Gregory Second and Blacky; Tottontail was the fourth. He did not appear, and he was not to be seen, either, where they had put him down on the other side. At last they spied him racing up stream as hard as he could go. He ran till he came to a place where the brook was only a little thread of water in the grass, and there he very sensibly stepped across; the only one of the whole party, cats or children, who got over without wet feet. Now who can help believing that Tottontail thought it all out in his head, just as a boy or a girl would who had never learned to swim? It was very wonderful that Spitfire and Gregory and Blacky should have plunged in to swim across, when they had never done such a thing before in all their lives, and of course must have hated the very touch of water, as all cats do; but I think it was still more wonderful in Tottontail to have reasoned that if he ran along the stream for a little distance, he might possibly come to a place where he could get over by an easier way than swimming, and without wetting his feet.

The summer was gone before the children felt as if it had fairly begun. Each of them had had a flower-bed" of his own, and ever so many of the flowers had gone to seed before the children had finished their first weeding. The little cats had enjoyed the gardens as much as the children had. When the beds were first planted, and the green plants were just peeping up, the kittens were very often scolded, and sometimes had their ears gently boxed, to keep them from walking on the beds; but by August, when the weeds and the flowers were all up high and strong together, they raced in and out among them as much as they pleased, and had fine frolics under the poppies and climbing hollyhock stems.

When the time of Johnny's and Rosy's visit drew near its end, Johnny felt very sad at the thought of leaving his kittens. They were "just at the prettiest age," he said; "just beginning to be some comfort," after all the pains he had taken to train them; and he was very much afraid they would not be so well taken care of after he had gone. Fred was going away to school for the winter, and Phil, he thought, would never have patience to feed thirteen cats each day. However, he did all that he could to make them comfortable for the winter. He boarded up the sides of their house snug and warm, so that they need not suffer from cold; and he made his Aunt Mary promise to give them plenty of milk twice a day. Then, when the time came, he bade them all good-by one by one, and had a long farewell talk with his favorite Spitfire. Rosy, too, felt very sad at leaving them, but not so sad as Johnny.

Johnny and Rosy and their mother were to spend the winter at their Grandma Jameson's, in the town of Burnet, only twelve miles from Mendon, and Johnny said to Spitfire,—

"It isn't as if we were going so far off, we couldn't ever come to see you. We'll be back some day before Christmas."

"Maow," said Spitfire.

"I'm perfectly sure he understands all I say," said Johnny. "Don't you, Spitfire?"

"Maow, maow," replied Spitfire.

"There!" said Johnny triumphantly; "I knew he did."

It was the middle of October when Johnny and Rosy left their Aunt Mary's and went to Grandma Jameson's. Much to their delight, they found four cats there.

"A good deal better than none," said Johnny.

"Yes," said Rosy, "but they're all old. They won't play tag. They're real old cats."

"Anyhow, they're better than none," replied Johnny resolutely. "They're good to hold, and Snowball's a splendid mouser."

These cats' names were "Snowball," "Lappit," "Stonepile," and "Gregory." This was the old "Gregory" after whom the kitten "Gregory Second" over at Mendon had been named. "Gregory" had been in the Jameson family a good many years.