Dixie's mother hisses at DixieThe Home Nest
Dixie's mother hisses at Dixie
Dixie kittenwas a slender little cat with the softest, silkiest black fur imaginable; that is, you would think it was black when you first glanced at it; but if you looked a little more closely, you would see that here and there were gleams of tawny yellow. Three of her paws were black and one was yellow. Her eyes were yellow, too, in the daytime, with only a narrow line of black down the centre; but at night they were black and shining, and surrounded by a ring of golden yellow. But whether it was day or night and whether they were yellow or black, there was little going on around them that they did not see. Her whiskers, all except two, were jet black,but those two were snowy white. When she lifted her pretty chin, you could see under it a soft yellow “vest front,” and at the top of the vest front a bit of the whitest, glossiest fur that was ever seen. It was so very pure and dainty that when the sunlight fell upon it, you would almost fancy that it was a bit of filmy white lace.
The first thing that Dixie could remember was of being cuddled up to some one who was soft and comfortable and gave her sweet warm milk to drink. Somehow, she knew that this was her mother, and that her mother would feed her when she was hungry and keep her warm and take care of her and not let anything hurt her.
Their home was a nest of soft hay, so deep in the pile that when Dixie was at the farther end, she could not see out at all. After a while, however, she crept out to the light now and then, and here were so many interesting things that her eyesgrew bigger and bigger the longer she looked. There were piles of hay and straw, there were bags of grain, there were rakes and spades and wheelbarrows, there was a carriage, and there was a sleigh. Dixie climbed up one of the shafts of the sleigh and stretched out her paw to touch a bell. She only wanted to see what it was, but it made such a loud jingle that she almost fell off the shaft. She ran away as fast as ever she could and hid herself in the safe and comfortable hole in the hay.
There were strange noises, too, that Dixie kitten heard, even when she was far out of sight in her own little nest with her mother. There were voices of men and the sound of their steps; there was the happy “Bow-wow!” of a dog; there was the neighing of horses and their crunching of grain, and the sounds of harnessing and unharnessing. Twice every day the great doors of the barn were thrown openand the Master drove in. She could hear him pat the horses and the dog and speak kindly to them; then his steps passed out of the barn and up the walk and into the house.
Dixie’s mother had made her understand that she must stay near the home nest; but there was a flight of steps close by, and Dixie did so long to go down them! She felt sure that they led to where those wonderful things that she heard must be. Her mother went down the steps sometimes, and one day when she was gone away from home, Dixie kitten thought that she would go, too. She went to the head of the stairs and stretched out her little right forepaw very carefully; but it would not reach the first step. She stretched out the left paw, but that would not reach any farther. She drew back and sat looking down the staircase for a while. Then she tried again, and this time shereached so far that not only the two little black forepaws, and the black hind paw and the yellow hind paw, but also her whole little black and yellow body tumbled down one step, two steps—and no one knows how much farther she would have gone, had she not come, plump, right against her mother, who had seen what was going on and was hurrying up the stairs as fast as she could run. Dixie was a much surprised little kitten, for her mother lifted her by the back of the neck and carried her straight to the little nest in the hay. Then Dixie was still more surprised. She had always thought her mother’s smooth soft paws were only beautiful playthings, but now one of them gave her a pretty hard cuff right on her ears. Even if Master had been listening, he could not have heard Mothercat say anything, but Dixie kitten understood perfectly well that she would get intotrouble if she went near that staircase again.
And yet, the very next day Mothercat lifted Dixie by the neck and carried her downstairs, and neither of them ever saw the soft warm nest in the hay again.