“Now, Dick,” cried Warlock, “if you’re quite done we would like to hear Shireen’s story; you may fly to Persia with the cuckoos in August if you like, and—”
“And perhaps never come home again,” said Tabby; “don’t you go, Dick, don’t you go.”
From all I can recollect of Persia, said Shireen, it is a very beautiful country in summer-time, although away high up in the mountain fastnesses of the North, terrible snowstorms sometimes blow, and here dwell tribes and clans of wild Persian Highlanders that are at war with all the world.
Yet, strange to say, these wild men are kind to their cats, and pussy in these regions is looked upon as quite one of the family.
But it was not in these wilds that I first saw the light of day, or any other light, children, but far away in what my mother called the sunny South.
“Much game there, mother?” asked Warlock, pricking both his ears.
“I’ll come to that presently, Warlock, you mustn’t interrupt, you know.”
My very earliest recollections then, you must know, are all centred in my mother. This is only natural. Besides, my mother was very beautiful indeed. My little brother and I—we were both born at the same time—disagreed about many matters connected with domestic life and family arrangements, but we were both of the same opinion concerning mother’s beauty. I was very young when I first opened my eyes, but I have only to close them again now, and mother rises up before me in all her loveliness. White were the snows that capped the jagged hills of the Zarda Koo, no snows could be whiter, but more spotless still, I thought, was the coat of my dam. Blue were the rifts between the clouds in the autumn, but bluer and brighter my mother’s eyes. Then every movement she made was graceful and easy. Was it any wonder that brother and I loved her, or that we sometimes fought for the best place in her arms?
Looking back through the long vista of years, I cannot help thinking that perhaps my mother loved my brother better than me. I am sure she spent more time in licking him, but then I may be wrong, for I was restless, and would at any time rather have romped with mother’s tail than submitted to her caresses when they took the shape of licking my face and ears with her tongue. Besides, brother had a black spot on his brow, which mother thought she would succeed in licking off. So she would lick and lick and lick until she fell back tired and exhausted on the cushion of crimson silk that formed our bed.
I did not know then the value that human beings attached to a cushion like this. Nor the value of anything around me.