Mother told us many things as we lay there, but I can't say I took much notice of them till my eyes opened. It was just a nice sleepy sound she made that sent us off to bye-bye one after another. I suppose she slept herself, but I never remember being awake when she wasn't. She was a very good mother; she hardly ever left us. Of course she got out of the bed to eat her meals; she detested crumbs in the bed, and so on. If she went away she always came back with a kind sort of speech--Rosamond called it a mew--something like 'Here we are again!' or 'Well, how goes it, infants?' and then lay down right on the top of us. Rosamond used to scold her and pull her off us, thinking she would hurt us; she didn't know that we were always able to ooze away from under mother quite easily when once she had turned round three times and got settled. Till my eyes opened I did not know how many brothers and sisters I had, except for mother's telling me. I fought them all without having the slightest idea of the sort of thing I was fighting. I knew it had claws, though. I knew that Fred B. Nicholson, as they called him afterwards, after Auntie May's American cousin, was a regular bully from the beginning, always putting himself forward, and shoving us away from the best places. After all, eating is everything in those first days, and mother was singularly weak where Fred was concerned, and let him batter us as much as he liked, and never took our side against him. She only said 'First come, first served!' and 'Heaven helps those that help themselves!' and certainly he did grow a great strong boy. Perhaps that was the reason why his eyes opened first! Rosamond gave us a great deal of attention when her own lessons were over, and before, and hung over us till she got all the blood to her head, she said. She called herself cat-maid. One day when she was leaning over our bed, she suddenly jumped up and screamed: 'Oh, Auntie May, one of them--I don't even know which, but I think it is Fred B. Nicholson--has got a tiny, tiny slit where his eyes ought to be! Do you suppose he can see?' I felt the first grief of my life. I _knew_ there was no slit where _my_ eyes ought to be, and I felt sure it _was_, as Rosamond guessed, that horrid boy Fred, who always got first in everything. Next day the slit in his face was bigger. That evening they said with certainty, 'Yes, Fred can see!' In the daylight Rosamond discovered that his eyes were blue. By that time _I_ saw what looked like a streak of light, and guessed that my eyes were going to open soon, and wondered if they would be blue too! I asked mother, and she laughed at Rosamond and at me, saying that all kittens' eyes are blue at first. Even Rosamond ought to have known that. The question was, would they be green or orange afterwards?