21 7 
The Burglar Man 
not be seen. After a long search they gave it up, 
hoping they would come to light by evening, and 
my poor babies lay all that day on the bare stone 
floor. 
I soon discovered that I had made a mistake, for 
before night their eyes were all watery, and they 
were sneezing a regular concert, so that when mis- 
tress returned in the evening it did not take her 
long to find them. 
She brought them up-stairs and wrapped them in 
a flannel cloth. Then she fixed our basket with a 
nice warm blanket, and set it in a sheltered corner 
behind the cook-stove, and there she installed my 
babies in their new quarters. For many days every 
morning and evening she would take a basin of 
warm water, and with a soft cloth wash out their 
eyes ; for the discharge would make such a thick 
coating as to close them up completely in a few 
hours. As the kittens were too small to be fed 
medicine with a spoon, mistress had to devise some 
new way of giving it to them. She dipped their 
paws repeatedly into a mixture called catnip tea, 
and, of course, they would lick it off. 
But even with this ingenious invention it was 
some weeks before my kittens recovered from the 
