E-text prepared by Sigal Alon, Sunflower, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 23737-h.htm or 23737-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/7/3/23737/23737-h/23737-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/3/7/3/23737/23737-h.zip) 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 [Illustration: In a strange house anything might happen.] 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