[Illustration: THE MILK RAN DOWN THE CREASES TO THE FLOOR.] Next morning They tried us again, but still we couldn't, and Rosamond seemed so terribly disappointed that we asked mother to tell us how it was done. 'You have to put your tongue over the milk and catch some of it up in the curve of it, and flick it into your throat in the same movement. That's all there is!' 'And quite enough,' sighed lazy Freddy. 'Dogs do it differently,' mother continued. 'They put their tongue _under_ the milk or water, or whatever it is they want to drink, but they toss it into their mouths in precisely the same way.' 'I shall never do it,' poor Zobeide complained. 'You will have to nurse me all my days, mother.' 'You great fat podge!' I said. (Zobeide was very roundabout.) 'Mother can't nurse you when you are taken away from her and sold, as you are sure to be. Then you will get thinner and thinner, till you starve, unless they feed you with a stylographic penholder, like poor Blanch; but she was an invalid.' 'Don't jar, children,' mother said, 'but give your minds to business. To-morrow, when they begin teaching you again, don't sputter so much, but try and make a start. It comes all at once, and once gained you never lose the art. You try and you seem no nearer, and suddenly--you find you can do it! Now I will tell you as a fact that I shan't be able to feed you exclusively for much longer. I don't know about looking fagged, but I certainly begin to feel it. I can't, for all the trouble I take, keep my coat as nice as I should like to, and that is a sure sign that the fatigue is beginning to tell on me. Four great kittens! They ought to have got a foster-mother--and I should not have liked that altogether! But I tell you that the time has come when you must all try to reinforce me and supplement what I can give you from extraneous sources.' Mother did use nice long words.