a jack-in-the-box; but instead of coming out, as she
expected, among the branches of the tree, she found herself in a wide,
open field as flat as a pancake, and with a small house standing far
out in the middle of it. It was a bright and sunny place, and quite like
an ordinary field in every way except that, in place of grass, it had a
curious floor of branches, closely braided together like the bottom of a
market-basket; but, as this seemed natural enough, considering that the
field was in the top of a tree, Dorothy hurried away to the little
house without giving the floor a second thought.

As she came up to the house she saw that it was a charming little
cottage with vines trained about the latticed windows, and with a sign
over the door, reading--

THE OUTSIDE INN

"I suppose they'll take me for a customer," she said, looking rather
doubtfully at the sign, "and I haven't got any money. But I'm very
little, and I won't stay very long," she added, by way of excusing
herself, and as she said this she softly pushed open the door and went
in. To her great surprise, there was no inside to the house, and she
came out into the field again on the other side of the door. The wall on
this side, however, was nicely papered, and had pictures hanging on it,
and there were curtains at the windows as if it had been one side of a
room at some time or another; but there was a notice pasted up beside
the door, reading--

THE INN-SIDE OUT

as if the rest of the house had gone out for a walk, and might be
expected back at any time.

Now, as you may suppose, Dorothy was quite unprepared for all this, and
she was looking about in great astonishment when she suddenly discovered
that the furniture was at home, and was standing in a rather lonely
manner quite by itself in the open field. It was, moreover, the
strangest-looking furniture she had ever seen, for it was growing
directly out of the floor in a twisted-up fashion, something like the
grapevine chairs in Uncle Porticle's garden; but the oddest part of it
all was a ridiculous-looking bed with leaves sprouting out of its legs,
and with great pink blossoms growing on the bed-posts like the satin
bows on Dorothy's little bed at the Blue Admiral Inn. All this was so
remarkable that she went over to where the furniture was standing to
take a closer look at it; and as she came up alongside the bed she was
amazed to see that the Caravan, all three of them, were lying in it i