After a week of Sparks' plaintive calls for her dead twin, I drove out once more to the farm, and came back with a small black 6-toed kitten. It was a gross error on my part. Far from accepting the newcomer as something to play with, Sparks hated her, and only after a few weeks would she grudgingly accept this newcomer.

Things were not helped by the little black cat being more vicious then Winnie, and showing a determination to rule the roost, together with an insistence that the other two cats mother her, groom her, and sacrifice all their special places to her. She pranced sideways, ran rings round the other two, and would often sit up on her hind legs and box them into submission, so we called her Skippy.