“How could you think, my dear little girl, that I would permit our cat to keep all that brood of six Kittens…? No, my love, they all must be drowned, except one, and you shall choose the one you like best. Were they all to live, there would not be rats and mice enough to amuse them, and, I am sure, you would like to see them kill and eat the pretty birds…” (9-10)

4.25 x 2.5 inches; (5), 6-31 (1)pp. 11 interior woodcuts + both covers. Good with overstitched spine loose at the bottom half, chip to lower corner narrowly missing the border. Early Babcock chapbook from shortly after the firm's Charleston SC office was opened; wholesale price on the cover. Inner wrap and other woodcuts likely by Alexander Anderson, and an early appearance of the popular cat woodcut (p. 12), barely relevant woodcut of an Asian figure in a conical hat with birdcages; and another unusual architectural cut on the inner rear wrap. 

A disjointed selection of lessons vaguely rooted in animals and their uses in life and death--from the limits of domestication to the utility of animal byproducts. In the beginning, a mother explains to her daughter why most of her kitten's litter must be drowned, and by the final lesson: "Almost all children have put alum into their mouths...alum is an astringent, oak bark is an astringent." Unrecorded in OCLC.