tontail," because he was all over gray, with just a little
bit of white at the tip of his tail, like a cottontail rabbit. And his
brother was exactly like him, only a little bit less white on his tail,
so it seemed best to call him "Tottontail's Brother;" and he had such a
funny way of putting his ears back, it made him look like an old man; so
sometimes they could not help calling him "Grandfather." Altogether
there seemed to be a very good reason for every name in the whole
family, and I think there was just as good a reason for calling "Lily"
"White Lily." However, as Phil said, "anybody could see she was white;
and nobody ever heard of a black lily anyhow, and it saved time to say
just 'Lily.'"

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

III.

Mr. Frank Wellington's house was an old-fashioned square wooden house,
with a wide hall running straight through it from front to back; at the
back was a broad piazza with a railing around it, and steps leading down
into the back yard. Grape-vines grew on the sides of this piazza, and a
splendid great polonia-tree, which had heart-shaped leaves as big as
dinner-plates, grew close enough to it to shade it. This was where
Mrs. Wellington used to sit with her sewing on summer afternoons; and
she often thought that there couldn't be a prettier sight in all the
world than Rosy Chapman running among the verbena beds with her long
yellow curls flying behind, her little bare white feet glancing up and
down among the bright blossoms, and half a dozen kittens racing after
her. Rosy loved to race with them better than anything else; though
sometimes she would sit down in her little rocking-chair, holding her
lap full of them, and rocking them to sleep. But Johnny made a more
serious business of it. Johnny wanted to teach them. He had read about
learned pigs and trained fleas, and he was sure these kittens were a
great deal brighter than either pigs or fleas could possibly be; so what
do you think Johnny did? He printed the alphabet in large letters on a
sheet of white pasteboard, nailed it up on the inside of the largest
room in the cats' house, and spent hours and hours reading the letters
over to the kittens. He had a scheme of putting the letters on separate
square bits of pasteboard or paper pasted on wood, and teaching the
kittens to pick them out; but before he did that, he wanted to be sure
that they knew them by sight on the paper he had nailed up, and he never
became sure enou