What had, what would, become of our baby? So thought the parents of
Honig-je', when they came back to find the houses swept away and no sign
of their little daughter. Dub-belt-je' and her kittens, and all the
cows, were gone too.

Now it had happened that when the flood came and the house crashed down,
baby was sound asleep. The cat, leaving its kittens, that were now
pretty well grown up, leaped up and on to the top of the cradle and the
two floated off together. Pretty soon they found themselves left alone,
with nothing in sight that was familiar, except one funny thing. That
was a wooden shoe, in which was a fuzzy little yellow chicken hardly
four days old. It had been playing in the shoe, when the floods came
and swept it off from under the very beak of the old hen, that, with all
her other chicks, was speedily drowned.

On and on, the raging flood bore baby and puss, until dark night came
down. For hours more they drifted until, happily, the cradle was swept
into an eddy in front of a village. There it spun round and round, and
might soon have been borne into the greater flood, which seemed to roar
louder as the waters rose.

Now a cat can see sometimes in the night, better even than in the day,
for the darker it becomes, the wider open the eyes of puss. In bright
sunshine, at noon, the inside doors of the cat's eyes close to a narrow
slit, while at night these doors open wide. That is the reason why, in
the days before clocks and watches were made, the children could tell
about the time of day by looking at the cat's eyes. Sometimes they named
their pussy Klok'-oog, which means Clock Eye, or Bell Eye, for bell
clocks are older than clocks with a dial, and because in Holland the
bells ring out the hours and quarter hours.