What Sally missed more than anything in her restricted life in the house was trees. There was something that was called a hat-tree in the hall, but it was a poor thing with no branches and merely a series of pegs, on which some garments hung at times. And in the parlor there was a very tall tree that Miss Harvey called a palm, that was no good for climbing purposes, because it was so slimsy. Sally could not see why Miss Winifred did not have an oak tree instead, for there were plenty of them around the Wild Wood and one of them would never be missed. If there had never been cats living here before, Sally could have understood it, but there had been so many living here. Her great-great-grandmother, Martha Furbush-Tailby, had lived here, and her great-grandfather, William Furbush-Tailby, had been born in the house. She should have supposed Miss Winifred would have wanted to make things comfortable for them. Sally and Oxford Gray, Junior, took to climbing Elvira and Miss Harvey as a substitute for trees. They preferred Elvira when she was in a friendly mood because she was so much taller, but she occasionally made disrespectful remarks, and said such words as ‘You little rascals, you little villains, you’ve torn my apron.’ Miss Harvey, on the other hand, seemed to understand, and not to mind the sudden surprise of a kitten running up her dress and landing on her shoulder and then pulling a comb out of her hair. ‘The poor little dears, they have no trees to climb,’ she would say. ‘They’ll be all right as soon as they are so used to the house that they will not run away if we let them out.’ There was another thing Sally could not understand. It did not seem at all reasonable to her that on cold days in June, when the house felt damp, there was no fire in the furnace. She had learned that the registers were places where heat came up in the winter. But why not have a furnace fire in summer when it was cold? Certainly cats could run a house much better than people if they had the chance. Although Miss Winifred had not been thoughtful enough to make mantelpieces wide enough for two kittens to walk there together, Sally did not by any means give up her desire to explore such delightful walks. In the kitchen the clock on a small shelf had a pointed roof and that in the dining-room had an ornament on top of it, but the parlor clock had a flat roof, so to speak, and Sally was sure it would be a grand place to sit and see the world from a high place, just as people saw it, for the top of the clock was only a little lower than Miss Harvey’s head. There were no candlesticks on this mantelpiece and the small ornaments were so placed as to leave plenty of room for a cat. There were two routes to the desired spot, one was by a low bookcase which could be reached by a chair, and the other, by the way of the piano. This Sally decided would be the best, for one of her favorite seats was the piano, which could be easily reached by a chair.