She bustled away with Tess and Dot and the basket of kittens, while Agnes started back along the street toward the grocery store. She had rather lost interest in Sandy-face and her family.
At once Tess and Dot were strongly taken with the possibility of teaching the kittens to drink. Mrs. Adams warmed the milk, poured it into a saucer, and set it down on the top step. Each girl grabbed a kitten and the good lady took the other two.
They thrust the noses of the kittens toward the milk, and immediately the little things backed away, and made great objections to their introduction to this new method of feeding.
The little black one, with the white nose and the spot of white over one eye, got some milk on its whiskers, and immediately sneezed.
“My goodness me!” exclaimed Dot, worriedly, “I believe this kitten’s catching cold. Suppose it has a real _hard_ cold before its mother comes back? What shall we do about it?”
This set Mrs. Adams to laughing so hard that she could scarcely hold her kittens. But she dipped their noses right into the milk, and after they had coughed and sputtered a little, they began to lick their chops and found the warm milk much to their taste.
Only, they did not seem to know how to get at it. They nosed around the edge of the saucer in the most ridiculous way, getting just a wee mite. They found it very good, no doubt, but were unable to discover just where the milk was.
“Did you ever see such particular things?” asked the impatient Mrs. Adams. She suddenly pushed the black and white kitten (the girls had already called it “Spotty”) right up against the dish. Now, no cat—not even a very tiny cat like this one—cares to be pushed, and to save itself from such indignity, Spotty put out one paw and—splash!—it went right into the dish.
Oh! how he shook the wet paw and backed away. Cats do not like to get their feet wet. Spotty began licking the wet paw to dry it and right then and there he discovered something!
The milk on it tasted very good. He sat up in the funniest way and licked it all off, and Dot danced around, delighted to see him.
A little of the milk had been spilled on the step, and one of the speckled kittens found this, and began to lap it up with a tiny pink tongue. With a little urging the other two kittens managed to get some milk, too, but Spotty was the brightest—at least, the girls thought so.