“They were very strange houses indeed—a good deal like willow bird-cages. In a snowstorm they would have been about as useful for a house as a mosquito net for an overcoat. But there came never a snowstorm; and the house where the Bee Baby lived was built of slender branches of trees, set in the ground, side by side, and interwoven with palm-fibre—the light glimmered through it in little flecks. The roof went up to a point in the middle and sloped four ways. That was woven even closer, of the palm leaves, so the rain couldn’t come through. The house had only one room, and nearly the whole of one side was the doorway—with the roof extended over it a little way, like an awning. There was no floor but the earth, and no door. So, when the Bee Baby woke in the morning, all he had to do was to rub his big brown eyes with his little brown fists, and trot through the open doorway, to be in the warm sunshine, where there wasn’t a fence nor a bar between him and the whole enchanting world.
“There was no one to watch him very closely, either, because he had no mother. He did have a father; but he spent a great deal of his time driving a pair of drowsy oxen in a cart with two solid, wooden wheels. Such a queer cart!
“Of course his father knew that one of the brown babies that played and tumbled about in the village of bird-cage huts was his. But when babies wear only their own shining skins to cover them, it isn’t easy for a father who spends most of his time driving an ox-cart to pick out his particular baby.”
“Not any clothes—didn’t they wear?” asked Pat.
“Most of the little children didn’t. A few of them—who were very fashionable—wore one garment. It was a straight piece of cloth that covered their plump little bodies in front; the ends were gathered up in the back, and tied in a bow between the shoulders. It looked very stylish—but the Bee Baby was more comfortable. Stand up a minute, Kitten, and I’ll show you how it was.”
So the Kitten came and stood before her, and she showed them how the fashionable little children dressed, using a piece of Chinese embroidery for the straight piece of cloth. Then they settled down once more to listen.
“If an owl had looked through a chink in the wall, very early one morning, he might have seen the Bee Baby’s family—his aunts and his grandmother and four or five brown babies and children—all asleep on flat straw mats on the ground. But nobody but an owl could have counted exactly how many there were, it was still so dark.
“Then the first sunbeam slipped in at a chink, and put its finger on one of the poles in the side of the hut. It felt its way slowly down, until it touched a small, dark heap at the foot of it.
“And that was the Bee Baby.
“He sat up on his mat and looked around him at the other heaps.