Excerpt: "Dixie kitten was a slender little cat with the softest, silkiest black fur imaginable; that is, you would think it was black when you first glanced at it; but if you looked a little more closely, you would see that here and there were gleams of tawny yellow. Three of her paws were black and one was yellow. Her eyes were yellow, too, in the daytime, with only a narrow line of black down the centre; but at night they were black and shining, and surrounded by a ring of golden yellow. But whether it was day or night and whether they were yellow or black, there was little going on around them that they did not see. Her whiskers, all except two, were jet black, [2] but those two were snowy white. When she lifted her pretty chin, you could see under it a soft yellow “vest front,” and at the top of the vest front a bit of the whitest, glossiest fur that was ever seen. It was so very pure and dainty that when the sunlight fell upon it, you would almost fancy that it was a bit of filmy white lace."
Eva March Tappan (December 26, 1854 – January 29, 1930) was a teacher and American author born in Blackstone, Massachusetts, the only child of Reverend Edmund March Tappan and Lucretia Logée. Eva graduated from Vassar College in 1875. She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an editor of the Vassar Miscellany. After leaving Vassar she began teaching at Wheaton College where she taught Latin and German from 1875 until 1880. From 1884–94 she was the Associate Principal at the Raymond Academy in Camden, New Jersey. She received graduate degrees in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Tappan was the head of the English department at the English High School at Worcester, Massachusetts. She began her literary career writing about famous characters in history and developed an interest in writing children books.