And Goliah was always a weak kit, and not nearly as large nor as handsome as the others, and not so very wise. But the gentleman’s wife took the best of care of him for Grandma’s sake.
The very funniest, cunningest thing Grandma ever did was to bring the kit that sat on the sticky fly-paper to her mistress. This happened before Grandma got to be so old. The kitten was very young, and it was her grandchild, the child of her daughter Sue.
One day the little fuzzy kit sat down on the sticky fly-paper that the girls who worked in the kitchen had left lying around. They had been forbidden to use it, for fear a kit might sit on it; and how they got the fly-paper anyway is a mystery. For the gentleman and his wife had built their pretty log-house away out in the mountains, thirty or forty miles from a railroad, and there were no shops in the mountains where one could go to buy things.
Probably the fly-paper had been sent by mistake with the things ordered from the far-away big city. Things were always being sent by mistake.
So the kit sat down on the fly-paper. Then it rolled over on it, trying to get loose.
The girls took it up as soon as they saw it, but it was a dreadful-looking kitten by the time they got it free. Its fur was all stuck together, and its paws and its ears and everything were terribly stuck up.
Then its mother and Grandma tried to put it to rights, and they licked and licked and licked, but the more they licked the worse it looked. There was no doing anything with it.
Finally the gentleman and his wife, who were in the sitting-room, heard Grandma crying very loudly at the door. They wondered what had happened, and opening the door saw Grandma on the step. She was talking very fast,—in her _meow_ talk, you know,—and behind her stood Mother Sue with the kitten in her mouth.
They had done all they could, and now they had come for help to the gentleman and his wife.
[Illustration: LITTLE MITCHELL WASHES HIS FACE “Out there in the corn-field he climbed quickly up to her shoulder, and sat there and washed his face with his little hands.” (Page 125)]
The gentleman was very angry when he saw the fix the kitten was in, and the careless girls in the kitchen got a good scolding, which I am sure they deserved. But before he took time to do any scolding, the gentleman got something that would soften the sticky stuff, and he and his wife very carefully cleaned the baby kitten’s fur, and then washed it with warm water and soap, and rubbed it dry. It was hours before they got that kitten put to rights.