r came up
and sat down on the side of his bed.

"What is the matter, child?" She bent over and felt his forehead. "No, you
haven't got a bit of fever," she said, and she kissed him, and began to
tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one of his
hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. "But you've had a long,
tiresome day, and that's why you've gone to bed, I suppose. But if you
feel the least sick, Pony, I'll send for the doctor."

Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he felt
as if he never wanted to get up again.

His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close down to
his, and said very low: "Pony, dear, you don't feel hard towards your
mother for what she did the other night?"

He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and he said:
"Oh no," and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; and she told
him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again; but she
was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing.

When he quieted down she said: "Now say your prayers, Pony, 'Our Father,'"
and she said "Our Father" all through with him, and after that, "Now I lay
me," just as when he was a very little fellow. After they had finished she
stooped over and kissed him again, and when he turned his face into his
pillow she kept smoothing his hair with her hand for about a minute. Then
she went away.

Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. His
father came in from up-town at last and asked:

"Has Pony come in?" and his mother said:

"Yes, he's up in bed. I wouldn't disturb him, Henry. He's asleep by this
time."

His father said: "I don't know what to make of the boy. If he keeps on
acting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning."

Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in the
morning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down to
his father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it did
not seem as if he could.

By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thought it
was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew that the
procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on his things
as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve to it,
somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers to keep it
on. He got his bundle and stole d