THE MOUSE-TRAP.
[Illustration]
MANY years ago, _very_ many years as you would think, though the time
seems short enough for me, there came to the little village (as it then
was), of Nomatterwhat, an old man. He was a very queer old man, and
nobody knew where he came from, or anything about him, except what he
told them himself; and that was very little besides the fact that his
name was Jonas Junk, that he had come to Nomatterwhat because he chose
to come, and that he would stay exactly as long as it pleased him and no
longer. The good people of the village, finding him such a very gruff
and crusty old fellow, thought it best to let him alone; and this being
exactly what old Jonas Junk wanted, he was well satisfied. Apparently
what he wanted beside was to build a house for himself: at all events,
that is what he did. He bought a large piece of ground and built a high
wall all round it, and put the ugliest and most vicious looking iron
spikes that you can imagine all along the top of the wall. Then he chose
the sunniest and most sheltered spot he could find on the place, and
there the old man built his house. Well, to be sure, what a queer house
it was! in the first place, there were three separate flights of stairs,
one for old Jonas himself, one for his cat, and one for his dog. His own
staircase was very easy, with broad low steps, and two landings, though
the distance was very short from the first story to the second; but the
poor cat and dog must have had a hard time of it. The other two
staircases were so crooked it seemed as if the carpenter must have built
them in his sleep, and have had the nightmare to boot. Each step was set
at a different angle from the one below it; and they were high, and
steep, and dark--ugh! I don't like to think about them. I remember I
tried to send a moonbeam down the cat's stairs once, through a little
skylight over the landing; and the poor thing got lost and wandered
about for an hour before it could find its way back again. There's a
flight of stairs for you! and everything else in the house was just as
queer. There were large rooms and small rooms, long rooms and square
rooms; there were cupboards everywhere, you never saw so many cupboards
in your life. Some close to the floor so that you bumped your head in
looking into them, others so high up in the wall that nothing short of a
step-ladder could reach them; cupboards in the chimneys, and cupboards
under the stairs; yes, there was no end to them.
[Illustration]
Well, Jonas Junk furnished his house, and there he lived for many a
year, with his dog and his cat, and nobody else. All the ground about
the house he made into a beautiful garden, full of pear trees and apple
trees and all kinds of fruit trees. People used to say, by the way, that
the reason these apple trees were so crooked, was because they tried to
look like old Jonas himself; but I don't know how that was. Certainly,
Jonas was not a beauty, and I am sorry to say the boys were disposed to
make fun of him whenever he ventured out of his queer house into the
village. "But what has all this to do with mice and a mouse-trap, you
ask?" Patience! patience! we are coming to that very soon. I am an old
man, older than all of you and all your great-grandmothers put together,
so you must let me tell my story in my own way. If Jonas Junk had lived
on till to-day, his house would never have been turned into a
mouse-trap; but one dark night, you see, he fell down the dog's stairs
and broke his neck, and there was an end of him. For a long time nobody
lived in his house, and the garden was all going to rack and ruin, when
one fine day a gentleman from a neighboring town came to see the old
house and took a great fancy to it; and finally he bought it,
cat-stairs, dog-stairs, cupboards, garden and all.
[Illustration]
Now this gentleman happened to be Uncle Jack, the uncle and guardian of
the Five Mice, whose father and mother were dead; and then it was, when
he came to live in it with his five nephews and nieces, and Mrs. Posset
the nurse, and Susan the cook, and Thomas the gardener, then it was, I
say, that the old Junk-shop, as the villagers called it was turned into
the most delightful house in the world, which I call my MOUSE-TRAP.
[Illustration:
NIBBLE
BRIGHTEYES
FLUFF
PUFF
AND
DOWNY]