as
like a little tiger, with a white face and shirt-front, white paws and
lovely green eyes.

He had to have a name, so, as he had a lot of brown, the color of the
English uniform, and came to me while the soldiers were here, I
named him Khaki. He accepted it, and answered to his name at
once. He got well rapidly. His fur began to grow, and so did he.

At first he lived up to my idea of what a kitten should be. He was
always ready to play, but he had much more originality than I knew
cats to have. He was so amusing that I gave lots of time to him. I had
corks, tied to strings, hanging to all the door knobs and posts in the
house, and, for hours at a time, he amused himself playing games
like basket-ball and football with these corks. I lost hours of my life
watching him, and calling Amelie to "come quick" and see him. His
ingenuity was remarkable. He would take the cork in his front paws,
turn over on his back, and try to rip it open with his hind paws. I
suppose that was the way his tiger ancestors ripped open their prey.
He would carry the cork, attached to the post at the foot of the
staircase, as far up the stairs as the string would allow him, lay it
down and touch it gently to make it roll down the stairs so that he
could spring after it and catch it before it reached the bottom. All this
was most satisfactory. That was what I expected a cat to do.

He lapped his milk all right. I did not know what else to give him. I
asked Amelie what she gave hers. She said "soup made out of bread
and drippings." That was a new idea. But Amelie's cats looked all
right. So I made the same kind of soup for Khaki. Not he! He turned
his back on it. Then Amelie suggested bread in his milk. I tried that.
He lapped the milk, but left the bread. I was rather in despair. He
looked too thin. Amelie suggested that he was a thin kind of a cat. I
did not want a thin kind of a cat. I wanted a roly-poly cat.

One day I was eating a dry biscuit at tea time. He came and stood
beside me, and I offered him a piece. He accepted it. So, after that, I
gave him biscuit and milk. He used to sit beside his saucer, lap up his
milk, and then pick up the pieces of biscuit with his paw and eat them.
This got to be his first show trick. Everyone came to see Khaki eat
"with his fingers."

All Amelie's efforts to induce him to adopt the diet of all the other cats
in Huiry failed. Finally I said: "What does he want, Amelie? What do
cats, who will not eat