l tell you all about them. Goldie!
come down from that stool, and sit down like a good kitten. Sweep! leave
off sharpening your claws on the furniture; _that_ always ends in
trouble and punishment. Snowball! you're asleep again! Oh, well; if
you'd rather sleep than hear a story----"

Snowball shook herself awake, and the others sat down close to their
mother with their tails arranged neatly beside them, and waited for the
story.

"I was born," said the brindled cat, "in a barn."

"What is a barn?" asked the black kitten.

"A barn is like a house, but there is only one room, and no carpets,
only straw."

"I should like that," said the yellow kitten, who often played among the
straw in the big box which brought groceries from the Stores.

"I liked it well enough when I was your age," said the mother
indulgently, "but a barn is not at all a genteel place to be born in. My
mother had had a little unpleasantness with the family she lived with,
and, of course, she was too proud to stay on after that. And so she
left them, and went to live in the barn. It wasn't at all the sort of
life she had been accustomed to."

"What was the unpleasantness?" Sweep asked.

"Well, it was about some cream which the woman of the house wanted for
her tea. She should have said so. Of course, my mother would not have
taken it if she had had any idea that any one else wanted it. She was
always most unselfish."

"What is tea?"

"A kind of brown milk--very nasty indeed, and very bad for you. Well, I
lived with my brothers and sisters very happily for some months, for I
was too young to know how vulgar it was to live in a barn and play with
straw."

"What is vulgar, mother?"

"Dear, dear; how you do ask questions," said the brindled cat, beginning
to look worried. "Vulgar is being like everybody else."

"But does everybody else live in a barn?"

"No; nobody does who is respectable. Vulgar really means--not like
respectable cats."

"Oh!" said the black kitten and the yellow, trying to look as if they
understood. But the white one did not say anything, because it had gone
to sleep again.

"Well," the mother went on, "after a while they took me to live in the
farm-house. And I should have liked it well enough, only they had a low
habit of locking up the dairy and the pantry. Well, it would be tiresome
to go into the whole story; however, I soon finished my life at the
farm-house and went to live in the stable. It was very pleasant