With a soft, caressing purr she stepped gently into the hat, took one of the squirrels by the neck, brought it to the edge of the table, and laid it down for a firmer hold; then sprang lightly to the floor.  Over to the basket she walked and dropped it tenderly among her other babies.  Then, having brought the remaining one and deposited that with the same mother-care, she got into the basket herself and curled down contentedly—­her heart all whole.

And this is how strange a thing mother-love is!  The performance was scarcely believable.  Could she be so love-blind as not to see what they were and not eat them?  But when she began to lick the little interlopers and cuddle them down to their dinner as if they were her own genuine kittens, there could be no more doubt or fear.

The squirrels do not know to this day that Calico is not their real mother.  From the first they took her mother’s milk and mother’s love as rightfully and thanklessly as the kittens, growing, not like the kittens at all, but into the most normal of squirrels, round and fat and splendid-tailed.

Calico clearly recognized some difference between the two kinds of kittens, but what difference always puzzled her.  She would clean up a kitten and comb it slick, then turn to one of the squirrels and wash it, but rarely, if ever, completing the work because of some disconcerting un-catlike antic.  As the squirrels grew older they also grew friskier, and soon took the washing as the signal for a frolic.  As well try to wash a bubble.  They were bundles of live springs, twisting out of her paws, dancing over her back, leaping, kicking, tumbling as she had never seen a kitten do in all her richly kittened experience.

I don’t know why, but Calico was certainly fonder of these two freaks than of her own normal children.  Long after the latter were weaned she nursed and mothered the squirrels.  I have frequently seen them let into the kitchen when the old cat was there, and the moment they got through the door they would rush toward her, dropping chestnuts or cookies by the way.  She in turn would hurry to meet them with a little purr of greeting full of joy and affection.  They were shamefully big for such doings.  The kittens had quit it long ago.  Calico herself, after a while, came to feel the impropriety of mothering these strapping young ones, and in a weak, indulgent way tried to stop it.  But the squirrels were persistent and would not go about their business at all with an ordinary cuff.  She would put them off, run away from them, slap them, and make believe to bite; but not until she did bite, and sharply too, would they be off.  All this seemed very strange and unnatural; yet a stranger thing happened one day, when Calico brought in to her family a full-grown gray squirrel which she had caught in the woods.  She laid it down on the floor and called the kittens and squirrels to gather around.  They came, and as the squirrels sniffed at the dead one on the floor there was hardly a mark of difference in their appearance.  It might have been one of Calico’s own nursing that lay there dead, so far as any one save Calico could see.  And with her the difference, I think, was more of smell than of sight.  But she knew her own; and though she often found her two out among the trees of the yard, she never was mistaken, nor for an instant made as if to hurt them.