"I'll tell you," said she, and her face, which looked sick and pale, colored, "if you'll come now, and hurry, we'll just have time to stop on the bridge and have some races." And sure enough, when we got to the bridge Mary produced a stained sheet of paper, and tore it quickly into little bits of pieces (we were pressed for time) and launched pair after pair of sea-going racers upon the swirling tide. When the last pair were gone upon their merry career she drew a long breath, and seemed as one relieved of a weight. "Perhaps," she said, "you needn't tell your mother where you've been--unless she asks you. Do you think that would be wrong?" I had never known Mary to suggest deceit of any kind. "If you think it would get you into trouble," said my sister, aged eight, very stiffly, "why, of course, we won't say anything." Mary was troubled. Finally she drew a deep breath and flung out her hands. "Of course, it would be wrong not to tell," she said. "You _must_ tell her." But by good fortune we met my father first and told him. "And papa," said Ellen, she had been swung to his shoulder and there rode like a princess upon a genii, "what do you think, way up the trunk there was an old shoe sticking out of a knothole, and we all thought that somebody must have climbed up inside and put it there. But brother couldn't climb up because he's too little, and Mary wouldn't try, and we thought maybe Sunday you'd go with us and see if you could climb up." I don't know why my father happened to take the line that he did; he may have seen something in Mary's face that we children would not be likely to see. He laughed first, and told us a story. It was about some children that he had once known, who had seen a boot sticking out of a tree, just as we had done, and how a frightful old witch had come along, and told them that if they went away for a year and a day and didn't say a word about the boot to any one, and then went back, they would by that time have grown sufficiently to climb up and get the boot, and that they would find it full of gold pieces. But if, during the year and the day, they so much as mentioned the boot to any one but their father, they would find it full of the most dreadful black and yellow spiders which would chase them all the way to Jericho, and bite their fat calves every few steps.