Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God Read Online Free PDF

more steeply, and he could hear though not yet see the wild rushing of the burn. He sat down there a moment to rest and took the frog out of the box and laid it on the moss, where it palpitated but did not move. Watching it, Geordie felt his heart swell with pity for its plight and helplessness and, putting it back into the box, determined to see the matter through without further delay.
    At last he came in sight of the cottage he sought, and with the guile of the Red Indian, properly instilled into every Wolf Cub, he paused, flattened out to reconnoiter.
    The stone cottage was long and narrow and had chimneys standing up like ears at either end. The lids of green shutters were closed over the windows of its eyes and it seemed to be sleeping, poised on the edge of a clearing of the woods on what seemed to be a small plateau, a broadening of the side of the glen, and where the burn, too, widened out and moved more sluggishly. Behind it and off to one side was another long, low stone building that had once been a barn, no doubt, or cattle shelter. Geordie hugged his box close to his beating heart and continued to study the surroundings.
    A covin oak raised its thick bole a dozen or so yards before the cottage, and yet its spreading branches reached to the tiles of the roof, and the topmost ones overshadowed it. The great oak must have been more than two hundred years old and from the lowest of its branches there hung a silvered bell. From the clapper of the bell a thin rope reached to the ground and trailed there. And now that he was himself quiet, Geordie was becoming aware of movements and sounds. From within the cottage there came a high, clear, sweet singing and a curiously muffled thumping. This, Geordie decided, was the witch, and he trembled now in his cover of fern and bracken and wished he had not come. The singing held him spellbound, but the thumping was sinister and ominous for he had never heard the working of the treadle on a hand loom.
    Overhead a red squirrel scolded him from the branch of a smooth gray-green beech; a raven and a hooded black crow were having a quarrel and suddenly began to flap and scream and beat one another with great strokes of their wings, so that all of the birds in the area took fright and flew up; blue tits, robins, yellow wagtails, thrushes and wrens, sparrows and finches. They circled the chimneys, chattering and complaining; two black and white magpies flashed in and out of the trees and from somewhere an owl called.
    The voice from within rose higher in purest song, though no melody that Geordie had ever heard, yet it had the strange effect of making him wish suddenly to put his hands to his eyes and weep. The beating wings ceased to flail and the cries and the flutterings of the birds quieted down. Geordie saw the white cottontail of a rabbit, and the bristly round back of a hedgehog down by the burn.
    Thereupon Geordie McNabb did something instinctively right and quite brave. He crept out from beneath his cover and advanced as far as the bell suspended from the covin-tree and the rope hanging therefrom. At the foot of it he deposited his box with the frog in it and gave the rope a gentle tug until the bell, shivering and vibrating, rent the forest with its silvery echoes, stilling the voice and the thumping from within the house. As fast as his stumpy legs could carry him, Geordie fled across the clearing and dove once more into the safety of the cover of thick green fern.
    The peal of the bell died away, but the quiet was immediately shattered by the hysterical barking of a dog. A Scots terrier came racing around from the barn behind the house. A hundred birds rose into the air, making a soughing and whirring with their wings as they flew wildly about the chimneys. Two cats came walking formally and with purpose around the corner of the house, their tails straight up in the air, a black and a tiger-striped gray. They sat down quietly some distance away and waited. As Geordie