“I once had a little sister,” continued the little mauve mouse, “who did not believe in Santa Claus, and the very thought of the fate that befell her makes my blood run cold and my whiskers stand on end.  She died before I was born, but my mother has told me all about her.  Perhaps you never saw her; her name was Squeaknibble, and she was in stature one of those long, low, rangy mice that are seldom found in well-stocked pantries.  Mother says that Squeaknibble took after our ancestors who came from New England, where the malignant ingenuity of the people and the ferocity of the cats rendered life precarious indeed.  Squeaknibble seemed to inherit many ancestral traits, the most conspicuous of which was a disposition to sneer at some of the most respected dogmas in mousedom.  From her very infancy she doubted, for example, the widely accepted theory that the moon was composed of green cheese; and this heresy was the first intimation her parents had of the sceptical turn of her mind.  Of course, her parents were vastly annoyed, for their maturer natures saw that this youthful scepticism portended serious, if not fatal, consequences.  Yet all in vain did the sagacious couple reason and plead with their headstrong and heretical child.

“For a long time Squeaknibble would not believe that there was any such archfiend as a cat; but she came to be convinced to the contrary one memorable night, on which occasion she lost two inches of her beautiful tail, and received so terrible a fright that for fully an hour afterward her little heart beat so violently as to lift her off her feet and bump her head against the top of our domestic hole.  The cat that deprived my sister of so large a percentage of her vertebral colophon was the same brindled ogress that nowadays steals ever and anon into this room, crouches treacherously behind the sofa, and feigns to be asleep, hoping, forsooth, that some of us, heedless of her hated presence, will venture within reach of her diabolical claws.  So enraged was this ferocious monster at the escape of my sister that she ground her fangs viciously together, and vowed to take no pleasure in life until she held in her devouring jaws the innocent little mouse which belonged to the mangled bit of tail she even then clutched in her remorseless claws.”

“Yes,” said the old clock, “now that you recall the incident, I recollect it well.  I was here then, in this very corner, and I remember that I laughed at the cat and chided her for her awkwardness.  My reproaches irritated her; she told me that a clock’s duty was to run itself down, not to be depreciating the merits of others!  Yes, I recall the time; that cat’s tongue is fully as sharp as her claws.”