Mortal foe of mouse and rat,
O, I love the old black cat. Yes, I do.

[From the "Schoolday Magazine," March, 1873.]

PREFACE.

This story of Mammy Tittleback and her family was told to me last
winter, at Christmas time, in Grandma Jameson's house, by Johnny and
Rosy Chapman and their mother, and by Phil Wellington and his mother,
and by Johnny and Katy Wells, and by Grandma Jameson herself, and by
"Aunt Maggie" Jameson, Grandma Jameson's daughter, and by "Aunt Hannah,"
Grandma Jameson's sister, and by "Cousin Fanny," the postmistress who
had the first sight of the postal card, and by Jerry, who had the worst
of the whole business, bringing the box of cats from the railway-station
up to the house.

I don't mean that each of these persons told me the whole story from
beginning to end. I was not at Grandma Jameson's long enough for that; I
was there only Christmas day and the day after. But I mean that all
these people told me parts of the story, and every time the subject was
mentioned somebody would remember something new about it, and the longer
we talked about it the more funny things kept coming up to the very
last, and I don't doubt that when I go there again next summer, Phil and
Johnny will begin where they left off and tell me still more things as
droll as these. The story about the little kittens swimming over the
brook I did not hear until the morning I was coming away. Just as I was
busy packing Phil came running up to my room, saying, "There's one more
thing we forgot the cats did," and then he told me the story of the
swimming. Then I said, "Tell me some more, Phil; I don't believe you've
told me half yet."

"Well," he said, "you see, they were doing things all the time, and we
didn't think much about 'em. That's the reason we can't remember," which
remark of Phil's has a good lesson in it when you come to look at it
closely. It would make a good text for a little sermon to preach to
children that very often have to say, "I forgot," about something they
ought to have done.

Things that we think very much about we never forget, any more than we
do persons that we love very dearly and think very much of. So "I
forgot" is not very much of an excuse for not having done a thing; it is
only another way of saying "I didn't attend to it enough to make it stay
in my mind," or, "I didn't care enough about it to remember it."

I heard the greater part of this story on Christmas night. Johnny and