Uncle Li and Uncle Wang are good friends. They live next to each other and their farms are both at the foot of the mountain. So they can help each other. But neither of them likes to use his head. They’re both poor though they work hard. Most villagers have built new houses, but they still live in the low and broken houses. They never find out why.

Once Uncle Li went to town to buy some medicine for his wife. In the town he heard the apples in a city were expensive. He told Uncle Wang about it as soon as he went back. They decided to carry some apples to the city. They borrowed some money from their friends and bought nearly 1,000 kilograms of apples in the villages and carried them to the city on a tractor (拖拉机). Bad luck! A lot of apples have already been carried there when they arrived. A few days later they had to sell them at a low price. They felt unhappy and returned to their village.

“I can’t understand why we sustained (蒙受) losses in business while others always profit (盈利)” Uncle Li asked one day.

“The tractor was too small” Uncle Wang said without thinking. “We’ll carry more apples on a truck next time!”

“I agree!” said Uncle Li. “How foolish (傻的) we were!”

On a freezing January morning, Myron opened the library in Iowa. She heard a cat cry and finally found a yellow kitten in a pile of books.

“His little feet were frozen,” recalls Myron. “We gave him a bath to warm him up and hepurredthe whole time so that we know he liked us very much.” That was 1988 and it was a story for Dewey, the cat who has lived happily among the books ever since. “His story has a life of its own, we have people drive hundreds of miles out of their way just to see Dewey. We even had a Japanese public television crew come here to make a short film of him. ”Shortly after the kitten’s rescue, a photo of the library’s “new employee” appeared in local newspapers. Local people were invited to vote for the name of the kitten. “We have never had such a big crowd for a contest and there wasn’t even a prize,” Myron says with a laugh.

Dewey grew from a popular local “library employee” to a national star with his pictures on calendars. However, he is not the only cat who lives among books. Library cats greet people in about 125 libraries across America. Most live and “work” comfortable, small town libraries where they don’t get lost in the books. Library cats used to make a living by catching rats, but library cats have more duties: to a make the library a pleasant place.

“Library cats just create a nice, warm atmosphere（气氛）, ”says Gary Roma, producer ofPuss in Books, the film about library cats. “The cats attract children to the library and the elderly who maybe can’t have pets in their apartments, ”says Roma, “Books, libraries, and cats just go together.”