"True elephants?" asked Annie, opening her blue eyes so wide that I was afraid of an accident.
"No," I said, "but very tame elephants, made of gray flannel, and with red saddle-cloths."
"Oh, I don't think they are pretty," she said.
Then I told her how I had once bought two elephants, a big one and a small one, and sent them to a sick little girl. And how, when I had gone to see her, she had said to me: "Them ollifans is too nice for anything, and they don't never bite me at all. The big ollifan is the mother, and she keeps me company; and the little one comes and puts his big nose under my chin to get warm. Oh, I just love them!"
After that I bought one more elephant, and killed him, and used his skin for a pattern, and made several other elephants, to be loved by little children.
"I know what I will do," said Annie; "I will make some kittens. Won't that be nice?"
I thought it might be very nice, if we could get a good pattern. And as she wanted to begin immediately, we looked in a box where I keep all sorts of remnants, and found a piece of red plush, which Annie declared "would be just the loveliest thing for a kitten."
As I had never seen a red kitten, I was a little doubtful; but since that time I have seen kittens red and pink and blue, and the children to whom they are given always fall in love with them at first sight.
But our kittens were not made in one day. We found it so difficult to cut a pattern that would "look like anything" that we had to send to a special artist in the city; and during the winter we spent a whole dollar for patterns of animals.
How we became a club happened in this way: