Unhappy but resolute, I started homeward, determined to rear those squirrels, if it could be done.  On my way I remembered—­and it came to me with a shock—­that one of my neighbor’s cats had a new batch of kittens.  They were only a few days old.  Might not Calico, their mother, be induced to adopt the squirrels!

Nothing could be more absurd.  The kittens were three times larger than the squirrels.  Even had they been the same size, did I think the old three-colored cat could be fooled? that she might not know a kitten of hers from some other mother’s—­squirrel?  I was desperate indeed.  Calico was a hunter.  She had eaten more gray squirrels, perhaps, than I had ever seen.  She would think I had been foraging for her—­the mother of seven green kittens!—­and would take my charges as titbits.  Still I was determined to try.

My neighbor’s kittens were enough and to spare.  One of Calico’s last year’s lot still waited a good home; and here were seven more to be cared for.  Might not two of these be spirited away, far away; the two squirrels substituted, and the old cat be none the wiser?

I went home by way of my neighbor’s, and found Calico in the basement curled up asleep with her babies.  She roused and purred questioningly as we bent over the basket, and watched with concern, but with no anxiety, as two of her seven were lifted out and put inside a hat upon a table.  She was perfectly used to having her kittens handled.  True, strange things had happened to them.  But that was long ago; and there had been so very many kittens that no one mother could remember about them all.  She trusted us—­with an ear pricked and eyes watchful.  But they were safe, and in a prideful, self-conscious, young-mother way she began to wash the five.

Some one stood between her and the hat when the kittens were lifted out and the squirrels were put in their place.  Calico did not see.  For a time she thought no more about them; she was busy washing and showing the others.  By and by it began to look as though she had forgotten that there were more than five.  She could not count.  But most mothers can number their children, even if they cannot count, and soon Calico began to fidget, looking up at the hat which the hungry, motherless squirrels kept rocking.  Then she leaped out upon the floor, purring, and bounded upon the table, going straight to the young squirrels.

There certainly was an expression of surprise and mystification on her face as she saw the change that had come over those kittens.  They had shrunk and faded from two or three bright colors to a single pale pink.  She looked again and sniffed them.  Their odor had changed, too.  She turned to the watchers about the table, but they said nothing.  She hardly knew what to think.  She was half inclined to leave them and go back to the basket, when one of the squirrels whimpered—­a genuine, universal baby whimper.  That settled it.  She was a mother, and whatever else these things in the hat might be, they were babies.  That was enough, especially as she needed just this much baby here in the hat to make good what was lacking in the basket.