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Five Mice in a Mouse-trap by the Man in the Moon, stories by Laura E. Richards |
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Chapter 2. The Mouse-Trap |
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_ CHAPTER II. THE MOUSE-TRAP MANY years ago, _very_ many years as you would think, though the time seems short enough for me, there came to the little village (as it then was), of Nomatterwhat, an old man. He was a very queer old man, and nobody knew where he came from, or anything about him, except what he told them himself; and that was very little besides the fact that his name was Jonas Junk, that he had come to Nomatterwhat because he chose to come, and that he would stay exactly as long as it pleased him and no longer. The good people of the village, finding him such a very gruff and crusty old fellow, thought it best to let him alone; and this being exactly what old Jonas Junk wanted, he was well satisfied. Apparently what he wanted beside was to build a house for himself: at all events, that is what he did. He bought a large piece of ground and built a high wall all round it, and put the ugliest and most vicious looking iron spikes that you can imagine all along the top of the wall. Then he chose the sunniest and most sheltered spot he could find on the place, and there the old man built his house. Well, to be sure, what a queer house it was! in the first place, there were three separate flights of stairs, one for old Jonas himself, one for his cat, and one for his dog. His own staircase was very easy, with broad low steps, and two landings, though the distance was very short from the first story to the second; but the poor cat and dog must have had a hard time of it. The other two staircases were so crooked it seemed as if the carpenter must have built them in his sleep, and have had the nightmare to boot. Each step was set at a different angle from the one below it; and they were high, and steep, and dark--ugh! I don't like to think about them. I remember I tried to send a moonbeam down the cat's stairs once, through a little skylight over the landing; and the poor thing got lost and wandered about for an hour before it could find its way back again. There's a flight of stairs for you! and everything else in the house was just as queer. There were large rooms and small rooms, long rooms and square rooms; there were cupboards everywhere, you never saw so many cupboards in your life. Some close to the floor so that you bumped your head in looking into them, others so high up in the wall that nothing short of a step-ladder could reach them; cupboards in the chimneys, and cupboards under the stairs; yes, there was no end to them. Well, Jonas Junk furnished his house, and there he lived for many a year, with his dog and his cat, and nobody else. All the ground about the house he made into a beautiful garden, full of pear trees and apple trees and all kinds of fruit trees. People used to say, by the way, that the reason these apple trees were so crooked, was because they tried to look like old Jonas himself; but I don't know how that was. Certainly, Jonas was not a beauty, and I am sorry to say the boys were disposed to make fun of him whenever he ventured out of his queer house into the village. "But what has all this to do with mice and a mouse-trap, you ask?" Patience! patience! we are coming to that very soon. I am an old man, older than all of you and all your great-grandmothers put together, so you must let me tell my story in my own way. If Jonas Junk had lived on till to-day, his house would never have been turned into a mouse-trap; but one dark night, you see, he fell down the dog's stairs and broke his neck, and there was an end of him. For a long time nobody lived in his house, and the garden was all going to rack and ruin, when one fine day a gentleman from a neighboring town came to see the old house and took a great fancy to it; and finally he bought it, cat-stairs, dog-stairs, cupboards, garden and all. Now this gentleman happened to be Uncle Jack, the uncle and guardian of the Five Mice, whose father and mother were dead; and then it was, when he came to live in it with his five nephews and nieces, and Mrs. Posset the nurse, and Susan the cook, and Thomas the gardener, then it was, I say, that the old Junk-shop, as the villagers called it was turned into the most delightful house in the world, which I call my MOUSE-TRAP. _ |
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