"You are right, Dottie," said the boy, with a twinkle in his eye. "And to repay you for my slip in manners, I will aid you in transposing that sentence so that your teacher will scarcely recognize it." And he did so. It greatly delighted Dot, for she did so love polysyllables. The other members of the family were convulsed when they read Neale's effort. The little girl carried the paper to school the next day and the amazed teacher read the following paraphrase of "A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse:" "A spasmodic movement of the eye is as adequate as a slight motion of the cranium to an equine quadruped devoid of its visionary capacities." "Goodness!" Tess declared when she had heard this read over several times. "I don't think you would better read that to Scalawag, Dot. It would make any horse mad." "Scalawag isn't a horse," responded her sister. "He's a pony. And Neale says he'll never grow up to be a horse. He's just always going to be our cute, cunning little Scalawag!" "But suppose," sighed Tess, thoughtfully, "that he ever acts like that brown pony of Mrs. Heard's. Jonas, you know." "Oh, Jonas! He is a _bad_ pony. He gets stuck and won't go," Dot said. "Our Scalawag wouldn't do that." "He balks, Dot--balks," reproved Tess. "He doesn't get stuck." "I don't care. You can't push him, and you can't pull him. He just stands." "Until our Neale whispers something in his ear," suggested Tess. "Oh, my!" exclaimed her little sister. "Suppose Scalawag _should_ be taken that way. What _would_ we do? We don't know what Neale whispered to Mrs. Heard's pony." "That's so," agreed Tess. "And Neale won't tell me. I've asked him, and _asked_ him! He was never so mean about anything before." But Neale, with a reassuring smile, told the little girls that Scalawag would never need to be whispered to. In fact, whispering to the calico pony would merely be a waste of time. "There's nothing the matter with the old villain but inborn laziness," the youth chuckled. "You have to shout to Scalawag, not whisper to him." "Oh!" murmured Tess, "don't call him a villain. He is so pretty." "And cute," added Dot. Uncle Rufus had built him a nice box stall and Neale took time early each morning to brush and curry the pony until his coat shone and his mane was "crinkly." Before the week was out, too, the basket phaeton arrived and a very pretty russet, nickel-trimmed harness. Even the circus trimmings had never fitted Scalawag better than this new harness, and he tossed his head and pawed, as he had been trained to do, arching his neck and looking just as though he were anxious to work. "But it's all in his looks," observed Neale. "He doesn't mean it." Which seemed to be the truth when the two little girls and Sammy Pinkney got into the phaeton with Neale and took their first drive about the more quiet residential streets of Milton.