stroke it.

"Stray kittens don't make friends very readily," said kind Aunt Polly.
"They think everyone is their enemy, till proved otherwise. We must
teach your kitten, Meg, that at Brookside Farm we like kitty cats."

"Where do you suppose it came from?" Bobby asked.

"Oh, some one had more cats than they wanted, so they turned it loose,
down by the brook," said Jud. "It's a mean trick and if I ever caught
a person doing it, I wouldn't waste a second giving him a piece of my
mind."

Meg stared at the forlorn white kitten gravely.

"You don't suppose it belongs to the man who washed the shirt, do
you?" she suggested earnestly.

Linda laughed. She was busily wrapping up the cat in tissue paper--of
all things!--because she happened to have a big wad of it in her
basket.

"There!" she said, handing the astonished kitten to Meg. "I can't bear
to have dirty things around me--you carry her like that and as soon as
we get home I'll wash her. If the cat did belong to the man whose
shirt I mended, I suppose you'd feel like going back and cutting the
buttons off, eh, Meg?"

Meg blushed a little.

"No-o, I wouldn't do that," she replied slowly, "but next time I
wouldn't bother."

However, Jud said that he didn't think a man who had to wash his
clothes in the brook and dry them on a bush had any cats.

"What are you going to call your find, Meg?" asked Jud when they
were riding home at half-past four, Peter eating his sandwiches
gratefully.

"Shirt," Meg answered placidly. "What are you laughing at? It's white,
like the shirt we found, and if it hadn't been for the shirt we
wouldn't have found the kitten at all and it might have fallen into
the water and been drowned."

And in spite of some teasing and much joking, Meg continued to call
the stray kitten "Shirt." True to her word, Linda washed the little
creature and when its fur dried it proved to be very pretty, soft and
silky. The kitty had blue eyes and by the time it was a full-grown
cat, Aunt Polly was immensely proud of it.

For Shirt lived at Brookside Farm and did not go with the four little
Blossoms when they went home to Oak Hill. Aunt Polly said Poots would
miss him and that cats didn't like to change their homes, anyway, and
Meg knew this to be true. And every year, at Christmas time, Meg
remembered to send Shirt a Christmas present and when she came to
visit Aunt Polly, he always seemed to know her.

The week of rain which Aunt Polly had predicte