Mammy Tittleback and Her Family: A True Story of Seventeen Cats by Helen Hunt Jackson

Mammy Tittleback is a splendid great tortoise-shell cat, -- yellow and black and white; nearly equal parts of each color, except on her tail and her face. Her tail is all black; and her face is white, with only a little black and yellow about the ears and eyes. Her face is a very kind-looking face, but her tail is a fierce one; and when she is angry, she can swell it up in a minute, till it looks almost as big as her body.

Nobody knows where Mammy Tittleback was born, or where she came from. She appeared one morning at Mr. Frank Wellington's, in the town of Mendon in Pennsylvania. Phil and Fred Wellington, Mr. Frank Wellington's boys, liked her looks, and invited her to stay; that is, they gave her all the milk she wanted to drink, and that is the best way to make a cat understand that you want her to live with you. So she stayed, and Phil and Fred named her Mammy Tittleback after a cat they had read about in the "New York Tribune."