I never saw a table more inviting.  After I had leaped up on it, I sat and looked all around a moment, trying to decide what to take first.  Everything was so good.  There wasn’t much room to walk about, and when I stepped over the jelly to reach the cheese, which seemed to tempt my appetite more than anything, my long tail switched the roses out of the bowl in the middle of the table.  That confused me slightly, and in trying not to upset anything else I stepped flat into the butter, and dragged my little plaid flannel skirt through the applesauce.  Why they persist in dressing me in this ridiculous fashion is more than I can understand.

You may be sure that I would have starved a week rather than have climbed on that table, if I had had the slightest foreboding of what was to follow.  But how could I know that Miss Patricia was to choose that very moment for walking into the dining-room?  She had just come in from the street, for she had on her bonnet, and carried an umbrella in her hand.  Phil and little Elsie followed her.

“Oh, you little torment!” she cried, when she saw me, and, before I could make up my mind which way to jump, she flew at me with her umbrella, trying to strike me without breaking any of the dishes.  I dodged this way and that.  Seeing no way of escape from the room, I ran up the curtains, over and under the chairs, around and around,—­anywhere to keep out of her way.  She was after me at every step.  When I ran up to the top of the high, carved back of the old-fashioned sideboard, I found myself out of her reach for one breathless minute.  She was climbing on a chair after me, when the cook, hearing the unusual sounds, opened the pantry door and looked in.

[Illustration:  “‘OH, YOU LITTLE TORMENT!’ SHE CRIED.”]

It was my only chance of escape, and, regardless of where I might land, I leaped wildly out.  I escaped Miss Patricia’s umbrella, it is true, but, just my luck, I went bump into the cook’s face, and then into the crock of muffin batter which she held in her arms.  She dropped us both with a scream which brought everybody in the house hurrying to the dining-room, and I scuttled up to the highest shelf of the pantry, where I crouched trembling, behind some spice-boxes.  I was dripping with cold muffin batter, and more miserable and frightened than I had ever been before in my whole life.

I could hear excited voices in the dining-room.  When Miss Patricia first struck me with the umbrella, Phil had cried out:  “Stop that!  You stop hitting my monkey!” Then as she chased me around the room, making vain attempts to reach me as I scampered over chairs and up curtains, he seemed to grow wild with rage.  He was fairly beside himself and bristled up like an angry little fighting-cock.  “You’re a mean old thing,” he shrieked, breaking over all bounds of respect, and screaming out his words so loud that his father, passing through the hall, heard the impudent rhyme he had made up the day before: