er out of the door, with
his harness on. Henrietta promptly forgot her stately manners. She ran
squalling across the farmyard and called to Ebenezer, "Where are you
going?"

"I understand that I'm going to the fair," he told her, as Johnnie Green
backed him between the thills of a wagon. "Once I would have been hitched
to a light buggy, with a sulky tied behind it. But now I've got to take
you and your family in this rattlety old contraption."

Henrietta Hen didn't wait to hear any more. She turned and hurried back,
to gather her youngsters and bid everybody another farewell.

Amid a great clucking and squawking, Johnnie Green and his father put
Henrietta and her chicks into the pen and placed it in the back of the
wagon.

"We're all ready!" Henrietta cried to Ebenezer. The old horse didn't even
turn his head, for he could see backwards as well as forwards, because he
wore no blinders. He made no direct reply to Henrietta, though he gave a
sort of grunt, as if the whole affair did not please him. He knew that it
was a long distance to the fairgrounds and the road was hilly.

"_She_ thinks it a lark," he said to the dog Spot, who hung about as if
he were waiting for something. "She's lucky, for she won't have to go on
her own legs, for miles and miles."

"That's just what I intend to do," Spot informed him. "They don't mean to
take me. But I'm going to follow you, right under the wagon, where
Johnnie Green and his father can't see me."

So they started off. And they had scarcely passed through the gate when
Henrietta began to clamor in her shrillest tones. But nobody paid any
heed to her. The wagon clattered off down the road. And old dog Spot
smiled to himself as he trotted along beneath it.

"Henrietta just remembered that she forgot to put on her best apron," he
chuckled.

XXII

ALMOST HOMESICK

Never in all her life had Henrietta Hen seen so many hens and roosters
and chicks as she found on every side of her, at the fair. Farmer Green
and his son Johnnie had set her pen in the Poultry Hall. And to
Henrietta's surprise, none of her new neighbors paid much attention to
her and her chicks--at first. She soon decided that there was a reason
for this neglect. She made up her mind that she would have to make
herself heard amid all that uproar or the others would never know she had
arrived.

Luckily Henrietta had a strong voice. She used it to the utmost. And it
wasn't long before a huge hen in a pen