nd whirled the leaders, and hard upon them came the wheelers,
and a-lack-a-day! hard, _very_ hard, upon a huge stone at the corner came
the runner of the front bob.

Had the whole sleighful been suddenly plunged into a hundred cubic feet of
hydrogen gas, sound could not have ceased more abruptly for one second,
and then there arose to the thousands of little laughing stars and their
dignified mother, the moon, a howl which made the welkin ring.

Shall I attempt to describe what had happened in the drawing of a breath?
A bob runner was hopelessly wrecked; two horses were sitting upon their
haunches, while two others were striving to prove to those who were not
too much occupied with their own concerns to notice that, after all is
said and done, the Lord _did_ intend that such animals should walk upon
two legs if they saw fit to do so. Michael stood up to his middle in a
snow-drift; Ruth sat as calmly upon a snow bank as though she preferred it
to any other seat she had ever selected, albeit she was well-nigh
smothered by the back and cushions of her novel resting-place; Toinette
was dumped heels-over-head into the body of the sleigh, where she landed
fairly and squarely in Miss Howard's lap; Edith hung on to the seat
railing for dear life, and screamed as though the lives of all in the
sleigh (or out of it) depended upon her summons for assistance. The sleigh
had not upset, yet what kept it in a horizontal position must forever
remain a mystery, and such a heap of scrambling, squirming, screaming
girls as were piled up five or six deep in the bottom of it may never be
seen again. Some had been dumped overboard outright, and were floundering
about in the snow, which, happily, had saved them from serious harm. With
the inborn chivalry of his race, Michael's first thoughts said: "Fly to
the rescue of the demoiselles," but stern duty said: "Sthick to yer
horses, Moik, or they'll smash things to smithereens, and, bedad, I sthuck
wid all me moight, or the Lord only knows where we'd all have fetched up
at that same night," he said, when relating his experiences some hours
later.

[Illustration: "STHICK TO YER HORSES, MOIK."]

When excitement was at its height the other sleighs arrived upon the
scene, and if there had been an uproar before, there was a mighty cry
abroad in the land now. But, dear me, it is all in a lifetime; so why
leave these floundering mortals piled up in heaps any longer? They were
unsnarled eventually, g