y the great sensation of the day. If Nina
or Vanya had been offered forty pounds of sweets or ten thousand
kopecks for each kitten, they would have rejected such a barter
without the slightest hesitation. In spite of the heated protests
of the nurse and the cook, the children persist in sitting by the
cat's box in the kitchen, busy with the kittens till dinner-time.
Their faces are earnest and concentrated and express anxiety. They
are worried not so much by the present as by the future of the
kittens. They decide that one kitten shall remain at home with the
old cat to be a comfort to her mother, while the second shall go
to their summer villa, and the third shall live in the cellar, where
there are ever so many rats.

"But why don't they look at us?" Nina wondered. "Their eyes are
blind like the beggars'."

Vanya, too, is perturbed by this question. He tries to open one
kitten's eyes, and spends a long time puffing and breathing hard
over it, but his operation is unsuccessful. They are a good deal
troubled, too, by the circumstance that the kittens obstinately
refuse the milk and the meat that is offered to them. Everything
that is put before their little noses is eaten by their grey mamma.

"Let's build the kittens little houses," Vanya suggests. "They shall
live in different houses, and the cat shall come and pay them
visits. . . ."

Cardboard hat-boxes are put in the different corners of the kitchen
and the kittens are installed in them. But this division turns out
to be premature; the cat, still wearing an imploring and sentimental
expression on her face, goes the round of all the hat-boxes, and
carries off her children to their original position.

"The cat's their mother," observed Vanya, "but who is their father?"

"Yes, who is their father?" repeats Nina.

"They must have a father."

Vanya and Nina are a long time deciding who is to be the kittens'
father, and, in the end, their choice falls on a big dark-red horse
without a tail, which is lying in the store-cupboard under the
stairs, together with other relics of toys that have outlived their
day. They drag him up out of the store-cupboard and stand him by
the box.

"Mind now!" they admonish him, "stand here and see they behave
themselves properly."

All this is said and done in the gravest way, with an expression
of anxiety on their faces. Vanya and Nina refuse to recognise the
existence of any world but the box of kittens. Their joy knows no
b