Meanwhile little Cynthia, with a delightful intrepidity, also took advantage of our enemy. While Mr. Bull continued to thrust his head at the hedge in his mighty rage, and roared forth his threats, high-couraged little Cynthia, if you please, very simply and dexterously dropped down my cloak out of the tree, neatly dropped down after it, and then with the most gallant coolness gathered herself up again, the cloak too, and even stayed to recover our late discarded posies, which the bull had evidently thought too mean to be worthy of his regard. With these articles tucked away in one hand, she gathered her skirts in the other, and away scudded her dainty ankles through the grass to the opposite fence. All this time the bull, foiled and nonplussed as he was, continued to fume and rush at the fence that kept him from me, but never for an instant did he guess that Cynthia was in the act of cheating him too. Convinced by this that my little one had made good her escape, I could not restrain my joy. I began to jump and clap my hands, and bellow out hearty encouragements and applause to her across the field. This behaviour so surprised the bull, that he whisked angrily round to discover the cause of it. He beheld Cynthia in the very height of her rapid victorious transit. Away he dashed, head down, in pursuit of her, but she was much too well advanced in her flight to have any fear of him whatever. By the time he had come level with the tree, Cynthia was calmly climbing into security over the stile; and when the outwitted animal rushed up and thrust his nose over it, she tauntingly, if a trifle vain-gloriously, shook the cloak and the posies at him. Never, I think, did I see an act more neatly or more bravely performed. When we came presently together again in the middle of an adjoining field, a sort of half-way house from where the bull had respectively left us, we were both in high feather and mightily pleased with ourselves and one another. "I declare," says I, "that hunting the fox becomes a tame and foolish sport by comparison. In all my amusements, from cards to cudgel-playing, I was never furnished, I'll swear, with so entertaining an episode. Besides, I am vastly proud of your conduct this morning, my prettiness. Come, let us waste not a moment; I am dying to get married at once."