Black White and Gray

Some young children, whose parents are working in India, are being brought up by an aunt in a small English village called Fieldside. The aunt lets them have a lot of freedom, but there are some "Rules of the House" which must be obeyed. When the cat has some lovely kittens, one black, one white, and one grey, they are not allowed to keep them, because there would then be too many cats than the Rules allowed, but they are given three weeks in which to find homes for them.

How these homes are found, and what happens then to the kittens, is the subject of this book. As always with Amy Walton's books, reading them gives you a feeling for the happy days in our English countryside, now long past, that existed at the end of the nineteenth century.

Amy Walton wrote delightful books for children towards the end of the nineteenth century. It is easy to confuse her with Amy May Walton, who wrote a little later, with different topics, and using a different publisher.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either on the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk