Chapter I: Front Matter

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Transcriber's note:

Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.

Dialect spellings, contractions and discrepancies have been
retained.

THE CAT IN GRANDFATHER'S HOUSE

by

CARL GRABO

Illustrated by M. F. Iserman

Chicago New York Laidlaw Brothers

Copyright, 1929 by Laidlaw Brothers Incorporated All rights reserved

Printed in U.S.A.

_PUBLISHER'S NOTE_

_It is peculiarly fitting in this day of delightful juveniles that an author of many books on the technique of writing should turn his pen to the writing of this child's book._

_Carl Grabo, with whose name "The Art of the Short Story" is at once associated, has written this whimsical and imaginative tale of Hortense and the Cat. Antique furniture, literally stuffed with personality, hurries about in the dim moonlight in order to help Hortense through a thrillingly strange campaign against a sinister Cat and a villainous Grater. The book offers rare humor, irresistible alike to grown-ups and children._

_It is a book that will stimulate the imagination of the most prosaic child--or at least give it exercise! Wonder, the most fertile awakener of intelligence, and vision are closely akin to imagination, and both are greatly needed in this work-a-day world._

_Each reader, a child at heart be he seven or seventy, will bubble with the glee of childhood at all its quaint imaginings. They are so real that they seem to be true._

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. "... going to the big house to live" 9

II. "And the darker the room grew, the more it
seemed alive" 20

III. "They could hear the soft pat-pat of padded
feet in the hall" 31

IV. "Highboy, and Lowboy, and Owl, and the Firedogs
come out at night" 48

V. "Jeremiah's disappeared again" 60

VI. "I'll have the charm
That saves from harm" 74

VII. "... there should be Little People up the
mountain yonder" 93

VIII. "The sky was lemon colored, and the trees
were dark red" 109

IX. "Tell us a story about a hoodoo, Uncle Jonah" 128

X. "Ride, ride, ride
For the world is fair and wide" 134

XI. "... take us to the rock on the mountain
side where the Little People dance" 145

XII. "There are queer doings in this house" 169

XIII. "This is what was inside" 186