“It happened that I had an old cat named Muff, and as soon as mamma had gone down-stairs, I took it into my head to pack her away in camphor balls.  So I put her into an old pillow-case with a handful of suffocating moth-balls, and tied her up tight.  She mewed and scratched at a terrible rate, but I tugged away at the heavy lid of the chest until I got it open, and then pop went poor old Muff in with the other furs.

“Luckily, mamma found an astrakhan cape, several hours later, that she had overlooked, and went back to the attic to put it into the chest, or the poor cat would have smothered.  When she raised the lid there was that pillow-case squirming around as if it were alive.  It frightened her so that she jumped back and dropped the lid, and then stood screaming for Bridget.  I didn’t know what had startled her, and she did not know that I had any connection with it, for I stood looking on as innocent as a lamb, with my thumb in my mouth.

“When Bridget came and saw the pillow-case squirming and bumping around, she said, ‘Shure, ma’am, an’ it’s bewitched them furs is, and I’d not be afther touching ’em wid a tin-fut pole.  I’ll run call the gard’ner next dure.’  So she put her head out at the attic window and screamed for Dennis, and Dennis thought the house was on fire, and came running up the stairs two steps at a time.  He untied the pillow-case and turned it upside down with a hard shake, and, of course, out bounced poor old Muff in a shower of moth-balls, nearly smothered from being shut up so long with that stifling odour.  She was sick all day, and Bridget said that it was a lucky thing that cats have nine lives, or she couldn’t have gotten over it.

“I cried because they had let her out, and said I didn’t want the nasty moths to spoil my kitty’s fur, and mamma laughed so hard that she sat right down on the attic floor.  Then she took me in her lap and explained how Muff took care of her own fur, and did not need to be packed away in the summer-time.”

“That makes me think of a scrape that Lloyd and I got into,” said Eugenia, “when she lived in New York.  We had seen a mattress sent away from the house to be renovated, and had asked the nurse all sorts of questions about it.  We concluded it would be a fine thing to renovate the mattress of one of our doll-beds.  So we ripped one end open and pulled out all the cotton and excelsior it was stuffed with, and burned it in the nursery grate.  Then we began to look around the house for something to refill it with.

“Down in the library was a beautiful fur rug.  I don’t remember what kind of a wild beast it was made from; I was so little, then, you know.  But papa was very proud of it, for he had killed the animal himself out in the Rocky Mountains, and had had the skin made into a rug as a souvenir of that hunting trip.  It had the head left on it, and we were a little afraid of that head.  The glass eyes glared so savagely, and the teeth were so sharp in its open jaws!  But the fur was long and soft and thick, and we decided to shear off a little to stuff our mattress with.  We thought it wouldn’t take much.  So I took the nurse’s scissors, and we slipped down into the library with the empty mattress-tick.