“That’s the idee,” says I, but I hadn’t any more notion than a rabbit what it was we could do to make folks laugh at them. Catty he set to work thinking it over between-times when we weren’t busy following around after Mr. Kinderhook. Of course, he came first and we had to look after him before we took up any other kind of work, but there was times when we were waiting or something, and then Catty figured on a scheme to upset Banty’s apple-cart. Another thing we did when we were waiting was to study—at least Catty studied. It wasn’t spelling or arithmetic, either, but a book that was called _Decorum_, and it was all about how to act. It told you how to act if you met a lady on the street, and how to act if you called on the minister, and what to do if somebody spilled soup on your pants, and which hand to take off your hat with, and all about how to eat, and that sort of thing. It was a most particular kind of a book, and it knew just exactly how a fellow ought to act no matter where he was or what he was doing. I never read it all through, but I’ll bet it told you the polite thing to say to a man with long whiskers driving a runaway sorrel horse in a northerly direction on a Thursday afternoon if you had a cold in your nose. I didn’t care about those things much, but Catty was so bent on being respectable that he didn’t miss a word of it, and most of it he learned by heart and then recited to his father, evenings. Yes, sir, by the time Catty got through with that book you couldn’t have fooled him _any place_. He knew how to act if the President of the United States stepped on his sore toe, and what to say if a middle-aged schoolteacher with a wig was to have it blow off in his face. He knew just how a man ought to act if a lady he didn’t know offered him a piece of pie, and what he ought to say if a perfect stranger had a conniption fit in front of the band-stand on the Fourth of July. The amount of information in that book was enough to surprise an owl, but what anybody was going to do with all of it I couldn’t see. But Catty could, and he practised it. I had to make believe I was all sorts of folks in all sorts of places so he could tip his hat to me, or ask how my pulse was beating, or how come I didn’t paint out the freckles on my nose. I got so I could be _anybody_ in a second. Catty would tell me I was a young woman that just lost her rubber in the mud—and I would _be_ it. I have been his grandmother and his aunt and the minister’s wife and a pair of twins and a senator and the coachman. I’ve been two men or a crowd, and I’ve been a sewing society and the actors in a play. I’ll bet I could be a wall-eyed moon calf with his head where his tail ought to be if he would give me half a second to get in the right frame of mind. It was a great book, I’ll tell you, and we had lots of fun with it; at least I did, but Catty took it serious. I’ll bet there was never anybody so chock full of decorum as he was. It oozed out of his ears.