The Story of Jennie- or the Abandoned Read Online Free

plenty of room in here, and besides' but that was as far as he got, for with a scream of rage the yellow cat launched his attack.
    His first lightning buffet to Peter's head knocked him off the pile of sacks on to the ground, his second sent him rolling over and over. Peter had never dreamed that anything or anyone his size could hit so hard. His head was reeling from the two blows, and he was sick and dizzy. The floor seemed to be spin– ning around him; he tried to stand up, but his legs gave way and he fell over on his side, and at that moment the yellow torn, teeth bared, hurled himself upon him.
    What saved Peter was that he was so limp from the first punishment he had taken that he gave with the force of the attack, so that the big bully rolled with him towards the door. Nevertheless he felt teeth sink into his ear and the needlesharp claws rip furrows in his side. Kick, kick, kick, one-two-three, and it was like thirty knife thrusts tearing his skin. More blows rained upon his bruised skull. Over and over they rolled, until suddenly they were out of the door and in the street.
    Half blinded by the blood that had run into his eyes, Peter felt rather than saw the yellow cat stalk back to the warehouse door, but he heard his hard, mocking voice saying: 'And don't come back. Because the next time you do, I'll surely kill you.'
    The water running in the gutter helped to revive him a little, but only for a moment. He knew that he was bleeding from many wounds; he could hardly see out of his eyes, there was a rip in his ear, and he felt as though every bone in his body was broken. He dragged himself on a hundred yards or so. There was a hoarding advertising Bovril a little further down the street, and he tried to reach it to crawl behind it, but his strength and his senses failed him before he got there. He fell over on his side by a pillar-box, with the rain pouring down in torrents and bounding up from the pavement in glistening drops. And there Peter lay quite still.
     

CHAPTER THREE: The Emperor's Bed
    THEN Peter opened his eyes again it was daylight and he knew that he was not dead. He was also aware of something strange, namely that he was no longer in the same place where he had fallen the night before shortly before he had lost his senses.
    He remembered that there had been a hoarding with a poster, a pillar-box and a long, low wall, and now there were none of these to be seen. Instead, he found himself lying on a soft mattress on an enormous bed that had a red silk cover over it and a huge canopy at one end with folds of yellow silk coming down from a sort of oval with the single letter ‘N' on it, written in a manner and with a kind of a crown over it that Peter found vaguely familiar.
    But now he was only concerned with the wonderful comfort of the great bed, the fact that he was warm and dry, even though he ached from head to foot, and wondering how he had got to where he was.
    For now that his eyes were fully opened, he noticed that he was in a dark, high-ceilinged chamber into which only a little light filtered from a small grimy window at the top with one pane out.it was really more a bin than a chamber, because it had no door and it was filled with furniture of every description, most of it covered with dust sheets, and piled to the ceilings, though in some cases the covers had slipped down and you could see the gilt and the brocade coverings of chairs and sofas. There were a lot of cobwebs and spider webs about, and it smelled musty and dusty.
    All the horrors of the night before came back to Peter, the pursuit, the noises, the hounding and the fright, the terrible mauling he had suffered at the hands of the yellow tomcat and, above all, his plight. Turned into a cat in some mysterious manner and thrown out into the street by Nanny by mistake . how was she to know that he was really Peter? . he might never again see his mother and father, his home, and Scotch Nanny from Glasgow who, except for hating cats,