“Stick on, son. It’ll come easier by and by. Everything does. And the outside of a horse is the best thing for the inside of a man. There’s nothing else on earth to equal riding. It’s--Keep the hand lower and the heels higher, son! Ball of the foot, not the instep, in the stirrup. So!” “It’s funny,” mused Jimmie, “how we happened to take this Frederick road when there are so many others. If we aren’t careful we’re liable to run into the Third Ambulance Corps wagon train before long. Emp!” he went on, hastily, forestalling any possible retort, “you and I are a lonely pair of youngsters, aren’t we? I wonder if you ever had a grandmother. Maybe dogs don’t. I don’t remember mine. “But sometimes it kind of almost seems to me as if maybe I can look forward to her, Emp. And it makes me feel pretty good. ’Cause I think she’s just the dandiest little lady that ever fell in love with the dandiest man that ever was, or ever will be, Emp.” “Jimmie!” remarked Dad, sternly. “Your shoulders are hunched over like a black bear cub’s. Square them when you ride. Don’t look more like a meal-sack or a Cherokee squaw than you can help.” The boy straightened himself to erect military carriage. And at once the jarring trot of the big horse shook his spine excruciatingly. He slowed his mount to a walk, thereat, with promptitude. “Want to turn back, son?” queried Dad. “Had enough of it?” There was a wistfulness in the kind query that went to the boy’s jouncing heart and made him resolve to be shaken to a pulp sooner than deprive Dad of a chance to see the one woman in the ambulance corps. “Nope!” he lied blithely. “I’m getting to enjoy it fine.” Their horses plodded along at a comfortable walk, neck and neck, and the boy breathed more easily and shifted his position in the torturing saddle. Emp took advantage of the slackened pace to dart to the roadside and begin to explore truculently a quite-deserted woodchuck hole. “Sic ’im, Emp!” encouraged Jimmie. “Dig ’im out, boy! Wrassle ’im!” Thus exhorted, Emp bent his entire canine energy to the task of unearthing a woodchuck from the hole where no woodchuck was. The dog’s yellow forepaws flew like pistons, widening the mouth of the hole; and his red little tongue was speedily flaked with earth. Backward from the swift-plied paws, as he dug, flew a cloud of yellow dust. And a generous share of that same yellow dust was hurled against the spotless gaiters and new baggy trousers of a corporal of Zouaves who chanced to be passing by, on foot, at that side of the road. The corporal, with a single glance at the cause of this defacing of his dandified raiment, swore fluently and launched a kick at the highly industrious Emp. Jimmie cried out in indignant protest. The kick, conscientiously, but too hastily, delivered, barely grazed the flank of the burrowing dog.