art of the field, where, resting in the shade of some
trees, were all the cows.

Oh, I guess there was a dozen and a half of them--big, nice mooley cows,
with brown eyes and long tongues, and they were all chewing their cuds
like gum, you know, and wondering why the farmer didn't come to drive
them home to milk, for they hadn't heard him calling them, you see.

"How are we ever going to drive them home?" asked Buddy of his sister.

"Let me think a minute," said Brighteyes, so she thought real hard for a
minute, or, possibly a minute and a little longer, and then she
exclaimed: "We must each take a long, leafy tree branch, and go up
behind the rows, and wave the branches, and tickle the cows with the
leaves, and they'll think it's a boy driving them home, and they'll
march right along, and the poor farmer, with his sore feet, won't have
to come after them."

And that's exactly what Buddy and Brighteyes did. They got some
branches, gnawing them off a tree with their sharp teeth, and with the
leaves they tickled the cows until they almost made them sneeze.

The cows looked around, expecting to see some boys driving them, but
Buddy and Brighteyes hid behind their big branches, and the cows were
none the wiser. So they swallowed their cuds, blinked their eyes,
switched their tails, and started up and down the hills, over the field,
toward the barnyard to be milked.

Now, before the farmer-man had come very far from the fence, he met the
cows, and maybe he wasn't surprised to see them coming. But he was glad,
too, let me tell you, for he didn't have to walk any farther with his
cut foot.

Then Brighteyes and Buddy ran and hid, for they did not want to be seen,
and the man jumped upon the back of a gentle cow, and rode her all the
way home, and told his wife how the whole herd, in some strange manner,
had come all the way from the back of the field alone. You see he didn't
know Buddy and Brighteyes had driven them.

Well, in a few days the man's foot was well, so he could drive the cows
himself, and the farmer's wife gave Dr. Bigg's family lots of
buttermilk; for, somehow, she guessed that the little guinea pig boy and
girl had done the farmer a kindness, as their papa had told them to.

Now the following story will be about Buddy on horseback--that is,
providing no cats get into our coalbin to scratch the furnace and make
it go out.

[Illustration]

STORY XXV

BUDDY RIDES HORSEBACK.

One night Buddy P