I saw her! My eyes had only been open about two weeks, and I was lying close to my mother in our bed under the porch that was round the house. It was a nice porch, with vines climbing over it, and I had been born under it. We were very comfortable there, but my mother was afraid of people. She was afraid lest they might come and look at us. She said I was so pretty that they would admire and take me away. That had happened to two or three of my brothers and sisters before their eyes had opened, and it had made my mother nervous. She said the same thing had happened before when she had had families quite as promising, and many of her lady friends had told her that it continually happened to themselves. They said that people coming and looking at you when you had kittens was a sort of epidemic. It always ended in your losing children. She talked to me a great deal about it. She said she felt rather less nervous after my eyes were opened, because people did not seem to want you so much after your eyes were opened. There were fewer disappearances in families after the first nine days. But she told me she preferred that I should not be intimate with people who looked under the porch, and she was very glad when I could use my legs and get farther under the house when any one bent down and said, “Pussy! Pussy!” She said I must not get silly and flattered and intimate even when they said, “Pretty pussy! poo’ ’ittle kitty puss!” She said it might end in trouble. So I was very cautious indeed when I first saw Betty. I did not intend to be caught, but I was not so much afraid as I should have been if she had not been so very little and so pretty. Not very long before she went away she said to me one day, when we were in the swing together: “Kitty, I am nearly five o’clock!” So when she came from behind the white rose-bush perhaps she was four o’clock. I shall never forget that morning, it was such a beautiful morning. It was in the early spring, and all the world seemed to be beginning to break into buds and blossoms. There were pink and white flowers on the trees, and there was such a delicious smell when one sniffed a little. Birds were chirping and singing, and every now and then darting across the garden. Flowers were coming out of the ground, too; they were blooming in the garden beds and among the grass, and it seemed quite natural to see a new kind of flower bloom out on the rose-bush, which had no flowers on it then, because the season was too early. I was such a young kitten that I thought the little face peeping round the green bush was a flower. But it was Betty, and she was peeping at me! She had such a pink bud of a mouth, and such pink, soft cheeks, and such large eyes, just like the velvet of a pansy blossom. She had a tiny pink frock and a tiny white apron with frills, and a pretty white muslin hat like a frilled daisy, and the soft wind made the curly, soft hair falling over her shoulder as she bent forward sway as the vines sway.