When I was 5 or 6 years old – around 1974 – I loved reading a book that contained a number of short stories. It was very elementary stuff; I’m guessing the target age range was 5 to 8. There were lots of illustrations.
I’m sketchy on the details, but I recall one story was about a cat (or kitten?) that was kicked out of his home. He was wandering around one day, lonely and cold, when he saw some fish in a pond. He got his paw stuck in a fishing line, and the fisherman (it may have been a boy) pulled in the fish and the cat. The fisherman took the cat home. The last illustration was the cat sitting in front of a warm fire inside the new owner’s home, and the cat was eating some of the fish that was just caught.
One of the other stories was about a family that went out on a lake in a rowboat. The boat started taking on water and sinking. It was later discovered someone had forgotten to install the plug in the drain hole.