"This is the story of the Boy and the Bull and the Horned Hen. Once there was a boy. It has frequently happened that there was a boy, so that it is hardly worth while referring to such a thing now, but, since we have mentioned it, we'll let it go. Tum-a-row! This boy lived in the country and was kind to a Hen. Little did he know that the hen appreciated and remembered it, but she did! One day this boy started to cross a meadow in which was a savage bull, and the boy forgot he had on his red sweater. In the middle of the meadow stood a tree which was blasted and which looked almost like a cone. It was what a young kindergarten teacher might describe as a trunk from which the branches had been riven away in some of Nature's convulsions, probably electric. Anyhow, the bull started for the boy and the boy started for the tree. Tum-a-row! The boy reached the tree four and one-third seconds before the bull reached the same place, and the boy began climbing and was at least thirty feet from the ground before the bull arrived. It is needless to say that the boy climbed with much rapidity. The bull followed rapaciously--yes, that's the word--and began climbing also with great rapidity behind the boy, and there was a race to what--if the term may be applied to such a dead trunk of a tree--to the topmast. There the tree sloped to a point, which the boy, climbing with avidity--that's the word,--reached easily, under the stress of circumstances. The bull, climbing swiftly after, attained a height of between ten and fifteen feet from his intended victim, and then, reaching the slope of compression, as one may say, of the dead tree, suddenly found himself without sufficient grasp and slid down, again and again, as he sought to reach the apex of the cone. The boy, meanwhile, was and properly, too, in a state of utmost fear, as the bull from time to time seemed almost successful in his upward attempts. "But there is a limit to endeavor. The bull, fatigued at last, slid downward to the ground, just as the hen, who, happily for the boy, had noted from the distant barnyard what was going on, came desperately to the rescue. The struggle which ensued was something doubtless without a parallel, or anything else in the way of similitude, in the history of single combats. It was something frightful! The bellowing of the hen, the hissing and cackling of the bull, the scattering of scales from both adversaries as they clashed together, cannot be adequately described. But the end came quickly. There came a moment, when perspiring and panting, the hen gored the bull with all her might, mind and strength, and he fell lifeless to the ground. "The moral of this story is, be kind to a hen. Tum-a-row!" "Why do you say 'Tum-a-row'?" suddenly demanded Erastus.