said Edward. “Stop your caterwauling and listen. Listen to the sound of the water.” The cats stopped. They crouched in their hat boats and cocked their ears and whimpered and cried in the dark. Gurgling and burping, the water climbed the walls of the oven, brick by brick. Slowly it lifted the cats up higher, up into the chimney and—gurgle-burp, gurgle-burp—out onto the roof. “We did it! We did it!” they sang as they tumbled out into the light. “Brave we are, brave are we, we have saved ourselves from the water tree!” Thirteen of the cats—black with soot and dragging their hats behind them—skittered across the shingles and down the drainpipe and out across the lawn, but the fat cat, the fattest of the fat cats, tiptoed back over to the chimney. “Edward! Oh, Edward!” “Yes?” “You were so good to us, handsome Edward,” she purred as she reached down into the water with her paw, “that I would just like to give you a little hug.” She was squinting down into the water now, her whiskers twitching left and right.
