The classified ad said:  "Kittens, spotted cuties! 1/2 purebred Bengal.  Mom is a Floozy, Dad is a Dead-Beat."

DillyDally's mother was sitting in the windowsill when she saw a handsome, attractive male in a nearby yard.  She pushed the screen out and joined him.  When her owner found her 20 minutes later, her purebred, in-heat Bengal had mated with an intact silver tabby - an alley cat.  Dilly and her 3 siblings were the result.

Dilly was 8 weeks old (born June 6, 2000) when we got her.  She spent the first evening isolated in my bedroom - she'd had her second round of shots that day, and wasn't feeling very cheerful or friendly.  Although none of the other cats hissed at her, she made it abundantly clear that she wasn't in the mood to be sociable (imagine an itsy bitsy kitten hissing and growling with great bravado in the face of cats that are 3 or 4 times her size - and each one of them backed away from her).

Her base coloring is a silvery gray (the picture above isn't very accurate, color-wise), with leopard spots on her tummy and mostly black and brown stripes elsewhere. She has a couple of beautiful gold splotches on her neck and on her forehead.

Dilly has overcome her "shyness" completely.  As a young kitten, she also discovered the stairs, shoelaces, bare toes and ankles, scratching posts, how nice it is to sleep in the crook of Mom's arm, the cords at the back of the computer, that she can get away with sampling food out of every cat food dish, that the male cats behave differently toward her than the female cats do, and that Dad's lap is a great place to flop out and take a nap.