cause her pleasure, and that I would
strive in all things to acquire a good name for gentleness and other
female virtues.

Alas! a Kitten's resolutions, made in the midst of pain and sorrow
caused through not attending to the advice of elders, are too apt to
be forgotten, when the aches are gone and the grief has worn away;
at least, to my shame be it spoken, it was so in my case, for when
I recovered I was more than once guilty of acts of mischief, which,
by good luck only, happened to be less serious in their results than
the event of the rat-hunt.

A circumstance which helped to make me thus doubly naughty and
disobedient, was the falling among bad companions. I had, at that time,
the dangerous fault of easily making acquaintance, no matter whether the
animals were such as I should or should not associate with. Not content
also with simply speaking and being civil to them, I became at once
extremely intimate, and therefore very naturally often found myself in
places and among dangers which I had no right to enter into or incur.

There came into the town, from a distant and wild part of the country,
a family of Cats, consisting of a father and nine daughters. They were
strange, shabby, half-savage looking creatures, and, having lost their
mother at an early age, had unhappily possessed no one who could
restrain or teach them better, so had grown up more like Toms than quiet
female Pussies. I was too young to know this at the time, and no warning
voice had been raised against them; for, fearing I should be denied the
pleasure of going out with my new acquaintance if I confessed to my
mother that I knew them, I never said a word concerning them, but ran
out to meet them on the sly. The elder Cats of the family rather
frightened me, they were so terribly wild; but the three youngest, who
were about my own age, I very much admired. They seemed so good-natured,
so bold, and were so free in their manners, that we became, in a few days,
the firmest friends; and although I was a little shocked at first at the
naughty words they used,--the biggest, I am grieved to say, sometimes
really swore,--yet I even got accustomed to that, and thought, silly
Kitten that I was, that it sounded grand and spirited.

Many and many a time, when my good mother thought that I was visiting
a relation or one of her own steady friends, was I scampering over the
country with these dangerous playmates, until, had I not possessed
so kind yet stri