Oh, wise Nathan! Then I thought him obstinate and contradictory. Halting, he planted his feet as though no power on earth could move him, and shot forward his long ears. Then it seemed to me that he was trying to show how futile my boast, and in my anger I dared to kick him. A fly would have moved him as well. His long ears trembled as he watched the road rising to cross the ridge, and he seemed to see over the crest and to hear noises too distant and indistinct for me. Then I thought him obstinate; now I suspect that while the Professor had given Penelope to my care, he must have ordered Nathan to watch over us both. The mule looked right through that hill. He saw the threatening army charging the other slope. He turned. The bushes opened, and we plunged into a narrow path which skirted the base of the ridge. In vain I tried to pull him back. In vain Penelope addressed to him her appeals. He was fixed in his purpose neither to hear nor to obey, and struck into a steady canter. I clung to his mane; Penelope, to me. The earth swung around us. Solid became fluid. The path moved up and down, and flowed beneath us like running water. Great trees broke from their roots and ran at us, and when Nathan dodged them, they swung down their branches to blind us with their leaves, and sometimes almost to lift us in the air like Absalom. The memory of Absalom was very clear in my mind, for just a week before I had seen his picture in our Sunday-school quarterly, and now, confused in my eyes with the dancing trees, I saw him, as I had seen him in the picture, suspended from a limb by his long hair, quietly waiting to be taken down. There was something more than a mere coincidence in that Sunday-school lesson. Here was another warning neglected. With Mr. Pound and Stacy Shunk, Miss Spinner took a place as a prophetess. She had taught me that boys who mocked their respectable elders were eaten by bears, and I believed her. She had demonstrated beyond all doubt that boys who defied their parents and ran away from home must come to a dreadful end in the entangling limbs of trees. With Absalom's example before me I had run away from home, and here I was being carried through the forest on a mad steed, and here were the trees running at me from every side, reaching out their forked limbs to seize my hair. Penelope was forgotten. More than once I tried to avert my impending fate by letting go of Nathan's mane and taking my chances with his heels and the stony path, but as I was about to close my eyes and let myself go he rose in the air, and the distance between me and the earth seemed so stupendous as to become the greater peril. Had the mule kept on his wild career I might at last have gathered courage for the fall, but the path came to an end, our pace slackened, the trees took root again; I was conscious of Penelope's encircling arms, and raising my head saw that we were in a broad road, and, better still, we were climbing the