imple, you're a smart little girl, I must say! I
don't mean to ask you to my party, if my mother lets me have one; and
I've a great mind not to speak to you again as long as I live."

"I shouldn't think you'd dare to quarrel, Jennie Vance, when you may die
the next minute. Let's get under this tree."

"Lightning strikes trees, you goosie!"

"O, Jennie Vance! isn't there a barn anywhere in this great pasture?"

"Men don't keep barns in their pastures, Dot Dimple; and lightning
strikes barns too, quicker'n a flash!"

Dotty covered her face with her hands.

"You don't seem to know scarcely anything," continued Jennie,
soothingly. "I don't believe you know what a conductor is."

"Of course I do. It's the man on the cars that takes your ticket."

"No; that's one kind; but in storms like this a conductor is a--a
conductor is a--why, I mean if a thing is a conductor, Dotty,--why then
the thunder and lightning conducts it all to pieces, and that's the last
there is of it! My father's got a book of _hijommerty_ that tells all
about such things. You can't know for certain. Just as likely as not,
now, our baskets are conductors; and then again perhaps they are _non_;
and I don't know which is the worst. If we were sure they were _either
one_, we ought to throw 'em away! that's a fact!"

"Yes, indeed!" cried Dotty, tossing hers behind her as if it had been a
living scorpion. "Do you s'pose _hats_ will conduct?"

"Nonsense! no. I didn't say baskets would, did I?" returned Jennie, who
still held her own dangling from her arm. "Yours was a perfect beauty,
Dot. What a fuss you make!"

As Dotty had all this while been stifling her groans of pain, and had
also been careful not to express a hundredth part of her real terror of
lightning, she thought her friend's words were, to say the least, a
little severe.

"Why, this is queer," cried Jennie, stopping short. "It's growing wet
here; haven't you noticed it? Now I've thought of something. There's a
bog in this town, _somewhere_, so awful and deep that once a boy slumped
into it, don't you think, up to his waist; and the more he tried to get
out the more he couldn't; and there he was, slump, slump, and got in as
far as his neck. And he screamed till he was black and blue; and when
they went to him there wasn't a bit of him out but the end of his nose,
and he couldn't scream any more; so all they could do was to pull him
out by the hair of his head."

"Is that a true story, no