ret rings and pasteboard telescopes.

He went to the bookshelves and took down _Black Beauty_. He had read
it before but he didn't mind reading it again. He liked the book
because he felt it showed just how a horse thought. He read until he
was called to dinner.

Two days later Jerry ran into real trouble. It was nearly six and he
had just come home from playing ball, when his mother said he had
barely time to run to the store for a pound of cheddar cheese before
the store closed. And the smallest she had was a five-dollar bill.
Jerry took his bike and determined to get back in a hurry. No stopping
to listen to a record this time, even if Mr. Bullfinch had bought some
new old ones Jerry would like to hear.

Not more than ten minutes after leaving the house, Jerry was ringing
the Bullfinch doorbell. He would rush in, get his change, and be home
in a jiffy. But nobody answered the bell. Jerry rang again, with his
finger pressed on the bell hard. He could hear the bell ring inside.
Still nobody came to the door.

"But they're always home this time of day," Jerry worried. He decided
it was no use to keep on ringing the bell. "They should have told me
they weren't going to be home," he thought, yet he really knew there
was no reason why they should. But he had to get in to change his
five-dollar bill. He just had to.

"They'll probably be here any minute now," Jerry tried to reassure
himself. "It's past time for Mrs. Bullfinch to be getting dinner." But
what if the Bullfinches had been invited out to dinner? Jerry groaned
at the thought. What could he do?

"I have to get in." That was the thought that kept repeating itself in
his mind, the thought that sent him around the house testing every
window he could reach to see if he could find one unlocked. "They told
me to come in any time, didn't they?" Jerry argued with himself.

At last Jerry found a cellar window unlocked. He pushed and it swung
in over an empty coalbin. The Bullfinches had an oil furnace but Jerry
could see by the coal dust that there had once been coal in that bin.

"I'll be bound to get my pants dirty but I guess it will brush off."

Jerry was half in and half out of the window before he realized that
he could not go on with it. He could not make himself break in the
Bullfinch house. He needed to get in. He kept telling himself that
probably the Bullfinches would not mind a bit, yet he still couldn't
bring himself to going in a neighbor's house li