ly amusing trying to make something of the sentences read
backwards. The Dictionary was her final resource, and she managed to
pass many tedious hours working straight through it page after page. She
had got as far as M, and life was becoming insupportable, when about the
middle of the day, on Monday, she was startled by a cautious and
stealthy noise, and also by a shadow falling directly on her page. She
looked up quickly; there was the round and radiant face of Maggie glued
to the outside of the window, while her voice came in, cautious but
piercing, "Open the window quick, Miss Polly, I'm a-falling down."

Polly flew to the rescue, and in a moment Maggie was standing in the
room. In her delight at seeing a more genial face than Aunt Maria's,
Polly flung her arms round Maggie and kissed her.

"How good of you to come!" she exclaimed. "And you must not go away
again. Where will you hide when Aunt Maria comes to visit me? Under the
bed, or in this cupboard?"

"Not in neither place," responded Maggie, who was still gasping and
breathless, and whose brown winsey frock showed a disastrous tear from
hem to waist.

"Not in neither place," she proceeded, "for I couldn't a-bear it any
longer, and you ain't going to stay in this room no longer, Miss Polly;
I nearly brained myself a-clinging on to the honeysuckle, and the
ivy-roots, but here I be, and now we'll both go down the ladder and run
away."

"Run away--oh!" said Polly, clasping her hands, and a great flood of
rose-color lighting up her face.

She ran to the window. The housemaid's step-ladder stood below, but
Polly's window was two or three feet above.

"We'll manage with a bit of rope and the bedroom towels," said Maggie,
eagerly. "It's nothing at all, getting down--it's what I did was the
danger. Now, be quick, Miss Polly; let's get away while they're at
dinner."

It did not take an instant for Polly to decide. Between the delights of
roaming the country with Maggie, and the pleasure of continuing to read
through the M's in Webster's Dictionary, there could be little choice.
On the side of liberty and freedom alone could the balance fall. The
bedroom towels were quickly tied on to the old rope, the rope secured
firmly inside the window-sill, and the two girls let themselves swing
lightly on to the step-ladder. They were both agile, and the descent did
not terrify them in the least. When they reached the ground they took
each other's hands, and looked into ea