warm room,
in his old arm-chair, making up his accounts and thinking of the old
days when he was young and active and never bothered whether it was warm
or cold. He was also very fond of talking about that time. And, although
he had talked about it more than once or twice before, they forgave him,
because he was so old, and listened to him patiently.

Jens attended to his work, which was not very heavy in the winter. The
forester's daughter spent her time between the kitchen and the larder.
The rat-catcher had been and gone, after doing his business and
receiving his pay. Forty black rats had been drawn from every hole and
corner in the barn and threshing-floor, but only two brown ones--and
they were quite young still--and no mice. But, as soon as the
rat-catcher had gone, the old tom-cat died of sheer old age and
laziness. He was buried in the garden with great pomp and ceremony. But,
even before he was committed to the grave, Jens brought a young cat over
from the keeper's; and there was every reason to hope that she was of a
different sort from the old one.

The forester, it was true, said that she was the very image of what the
old one was when she was young. And that too may have been right enough,
for one can't judge youth by old age. This much, in any case, was
certain, that she went hunting. The odd man had said that she must have
her morning milk and nothing more before she caught a mouse or a rat.
And so it stood. Whenever she showed herself for the first time, after
her morning milk, she was asked:

"Where is your mouse or your rat?"

And gradually she grew so used to this that, as soon as she was asked,
she ran off and fetched the mouse or the rat, which she had been careful
not to eat before. Then, as a reward, she received a scrap of bacon, or
something else that was left over from breakfast. But, on days when she
had no mouse or rat to show, then she received no bacon either. That was
as sure as March in Lent.

The young lady no longer interested herself in the matter, but left it
all to the odd man. Whenever she caught sight of the hole in the
dining-room wainscot, she sighed and said:

"You naughty, naughty Mouse, to abuse my trust in you so shamefully! I
was good to you and gave you sugar every day; and you stole the
cinnamon. Now I have been good to you again and taken away the poison
which the rat-catcher put outside your hole. What advantage do you
propose to take of me this time? But you can