uard against marauders and, at the
approach of the most amiable old gossip, would fill up the wire doorway
with her own slender body, spitting and bristling in the very face of
the disconcerted guest. Cinderella, the most precocious of the kittens,
observed with admiration this form of welcome and scandalized all
observers by scampering to the door one day, as her mother was
returning from a brief constitutional, and with all due ceremonies of
defiance refusing her admission. After one astonished instant, Polly
recovered her presence of mind, bowled out of the way that comical ball
of impudence and made it her first parental duty, after entering, to
box Cinder's ears.

As the kittens grew older, they had the run of the house, which they
filled with elfin mirth of motion and reels of Puckish revel. Placed in
a row on my desk, they would watch the moving pen with fascinated eyes,
till one shy paw after another would steal out to investigate and
presently there would be a flurry of funny antics all over a blotted
page. By autumn they had all gone their ways to different households,
except Esther's Daisy, whom we kept, but the joy of kittenhood was the
only life they had. Doom, like a black cat hunting mice, speedily
caught them all, unless, perchance, dogs and motors were kinder than we
fear to Cinder, who, one winter day, after her morning saucer of milk,
struck blithely out into the sunshine from the best of homes and never,
though search, inquiry and advertisement did their utmost, was heard of
again. Little Bub proved so puny that he was left with Polly,
reinstated, much to her content, in her own kingdom, but not even her
puzzled solicitude, varied by cuffings, could keep him alive. As for
Topsy and Daisy, I have not the heart to tell how they perished, but
though I say it as should not, Daisy was too bad for this world. An
incarnate imp, she mocked all discipline and scorned all affection,
capering into new mischief at every rebuke and scratching herself free
from caresses. Despising laps and cushions, she took to the air like an
aeroplane, forever on the leap from one forbidden shelf, mantel or
flower-pot to another. Her agility was supernatural. She would hang
from a curtain cord, spring thence to the top of a door, pounce on a
bowing caller's back, and, within ten seconds fill the hall with such
skurry and commotion that Hecate and all her witches could have done no
more. She could not keep quiet, even at night, u