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

Mr. Frank Wellington's house was an old-fashioned square wooden house, with a wide hall running straight through it from front to back; at the back was a broad piazza with a railing around it, and steps leading down into the back yard. Grape-vines grew on the sides of this piazza, and a splendid great polonia-tree, which had heart-shaped leaves as big as dinner-plates, grew close enough to it to shade it. This was where Mrs. Wellington used to sit with her sewing on summer afternoons; and she often thought that there couldn't be a prettier sight in all the world than Rosy Chapman running among the verbena beds with her long yellow curls flying behind, her little bare white feet glancing up and down among the bright blossoms, and half a dozen kittens racing after her. Rosy loved to race with them better than anything else; though sometimes she would sit down in her little rocking-chair, holding her lap full of them, and rocking them to sleep. But Johnny made a more serious business of it. Johnny wanted to teach them. He had read about learned pigs and trained fleas, and he was sure these kittens were a great deal brighter than either pigs or fleas could possibly be; so what do you think Johnny did? He printed the alphabet in large letters on a sheet of white pasteboard, nailed it up on the inside of the largest room in the cats' house, and spent hours and hours reading the letters over to the kittens. He had a scheme of putting the letters on separate square bits of pasteboard or paper pasted on wood, and teaching the kittens to pick them out; but before he did that, he wanted to be sure that they knew them by sight on the paper he had nailed up, and he never became sure enough of that to go on any farther in his teaching. In fact, he never got any farther than to succeed in keeping them still for a few minutes while he read the letters aloud. The cat that kept still the longest, he said, was the best scholar that day; he put their names down in a little book, and gave them good and bad marks according as they behaved, just as he and Rosy used to get marks in school.

After Johnny got all his flags up, the cats' house looked very pretty. It had four flags on it; one was a big one with the stars and stripes, and "Our Republic" in big letters on it; one was a "Garfield and Arthur" flag, which had been given to Johnny by the Garfield Club in Mendon; underneath this was a small white one Johnny made himself, with "Hurrah for Both" on it in rather uneven letters; then at two of the corners of the house were small red, white, and blue flags of the common sort. But the glory of all was a big flag on a flagstaff twenty feet high, which Uncle Frank put up for the boys. This also was a "Garfield and Arthur" flag, and a very fine one it was too. The kittens used to look up longingly at all these bright flags blowing in the wind above their house; but Johnny had taken care to put them high enough to be beyond their reach even when they climbed up to the ridgepole. They would have made tatters of them all in five seconds if they could have ever got their claws into them.