ju-ju was a cat. she was grey, like smoke, and had a bushy tail and long hair and yellow eyes. i don’t think yellow eyes are very pretty, do you? none of us ever liked ju-ju very much, although we soon got to respect her. she was very vain of her long hair and thick tail and used to spend hours doing nothing but washing herself. cats are very lazy, i think, and waste too much time on themselves. once i asked mother what cats were for and she sighed and said she used to think they were to chase but she had changed her mind and thought now they were just to look at. mother had a place on her nose like a scratch where the hair never grew and sometimes i’ve wondered whether ju-ju made it. when we first got out into the yard ju-ju used to come and jump on top of one of the fence-posts and look down at us just as though we were funny and strange. that used to make us very angry and we would bark and jump at the post for the longest time. but of course we couldn’t reach her and after awhile she would blink and blink at us and then go to sleep up there! cats are very annoying. they’re almost as bad as ducks!
we were born in the spring and lived in the yard until we were four months old. then my brother, whose name was franz, and one of my sisters, whose name was franzchen, left us. they went away off to live in the city and freya and i were quite lonely at first, and our mother felt very badly about it. but she told us that they had gone to live with some nice, kind people and would be very happy, and after that we didn’t feel so badly about it.
after franz and franzchen left us we were no longer kept in the kennel yard, but were allowed to go anywhere we pleased—except the house. we weren’t allowed in the house, but sometimes we got in. when we did we scampered straight for the kitchen. the first time we did it cook had a tin dish filled with cake-batter in her hand and when we ran at her and barked and jumped up on her she was so surprised and scared that she cried “saints presarve us!” and dropped the dish. most of the batter went on freya and she ran out as quick as she could go, much more frightened than cook, and i after her. we had a fine time licking the batter off. it was nice and sweet and sticky and lasted all day. father was quite angry with us, but mother said “puppies will be puppies.”
after that it was very hard to get in the kitchen, and when we did get in cook would drive us out with a broom. of course we tried not to go and made believe we didn’t know what she meant when she cried “shoo!” and “scat!” we would run under the tables and into the pantry and quite often she would have to coax us out with pieces of meat or something nice. it was very exciting. if we thought she really meant to hit us with the broom we would lie on our backs with our feet in the air and pretend we were awfully frightened. then delia, who was the maid and a great friend of ours, would say “oh, the poor little dears. don’t you dare hit them, mary mcguire!” then we would have a piece of cake each and delia would pet us and put us outside.
father was a very busy dog and had a great many things to look after. he always went to drive with our mistress and sat very straight and fine beside william on the front seat. then, too, he had to help william do all sorts of things, like wash the carriages and feed the chickens and ducks and cut the grass and rake the leaves. he must have been a great comfort to william.
mother had her paws full looking after us most of that summer and so she was not able to help much with the work. of course she kept watch and taught us to, and we soon learned who to bark at and who not. when the man from the butcher’s came mother always made it a point to be very polite to him. she wagged her tail and sniffed his boots and followed him around to the kitchen door. he smelled very nice. sometimes he gave us small pieces of meat and we were always glad to see him. but when a tramp or a pedlar came mother barked and the hair stood up all along her back. we soon learned to do the same and tramps didn’t very often come much farther than the gate.
of course we learned a great many other things too. such as to stand on our hind legs and beg when we wanted anything and not get under the feet of the horses and keep away from the carriage wheels. once a wheel went over the end of my tail and it hurt a good deal and i crawled into a stall and cried. mother came and told me i was too old to cry and that it would teach me to keep out of the way.
another thing we learned was not to jump up on the baby. we did it because we loved her and wanted to lick her face, but she always tumbled over. that was because she only had two legs and was no fault of ours. once when she tumbled she struck her head against something hard and cried dreadfully. we licked her face as hard as we could to comfort her, because that is what mother always did to us when we were hurt, but it didn’t seem to do her much good. then william came running up and cuffed us pretty hard and picked baby up. i don’t think he should have punished us, but maybe he didn’t understand. after that we didn’t do it any more.
another thing we soon learned was to let ju-ju alone. one day, soon after we were allowed to go where we liked, freya and i came across ju-ju in the kitchen yard. she was fast asleep and we thought it would be great fun to jump at her and bark. so we did it and she woke up awfully quick and scratched me on the nose and chased freya half-way to the stable. cats can’t take a joke.
