I hear this kind of thing in the drawing-room on Auntie May's at-home day, when we are often carried downstairs in a basket and allowed to play about and amuse the people. One hears a good deal. People who don't like cats think that Auntie May makes a perfect fool of herself about us. Once when Auntie May was persuaded to bring us down, to please a Mrs. Wheeler, I heard, with my own big ears, Mrs. Wheeler begin her sentence one way and finish it another. 'Lovely creatures, so beautiful in the firelight, when the light catches their outside fur and makes it shine like silver--' (Then Auntie May moved off and she went on) 'Poor, dear May! She is a bit of a bore with her cats, don't you think so? Do you notice how she always brings the conversation round to them in the end? It is a great mistake. She will be an old maid, it's a sure sign! Look at her now with a saucer on the floor and those three cats making a Manx penny all round it, and a nice man wanting to talk to her, and can't get a word from her! He looks disgusted, and no wonder!' Auntie May didn't really keep us downstairs very long, and the nice man, as it happened, carried us up for her to her study, and put us all back in our basket, and stayed up talking with her quite a long time, and talking about Mrs. Wheeler, the very woman who had been abusing Auntie May for loving us so. 'She's a cat, that's what she is!' the nice man said, and Auntie May agreed, which was rather insulting to us. I am, however, not quite sure whether he didn't say a _d_ instead of a _t_, which with them makes quite a different word. Presently they said it was June, and the weather got beautiful. Auntie May thought we ought to take the air in the garden, and be allowed to run about on the grass. Rosamond was overjoyed, and so were we, at first. Then we began to get frightened. There was absolutely nothing on the top of us except the sky and the sun. I missed the nice sheltering bed and the cosy walls of the room we had lived in always. I felt as if the top of my skull had been taken off. I saw nothing to hide under either, except black poles that simply ran up straight into the blue. The sun was very hot, too, and I suppose I looked wretched, for suddenly Rosamond said: 'I do believe Loki has got a sunstroke, like Kitty had last year. His poor little head is so hot--feel!' Auntie May was in such a fright that she bundled us all into the house.