Dick, this is some of your work!"

"Maybe," said Dick, still choking with laughter, "but what on earth is
happening in the wood?"

"Help! Lions! Help! They're after me! Help!"

The cries came thick and fast.

"It's the professor," choked out Dick.

"He says there are lions in there," cried Tom, looking rather
alarmed, but at this juncture something happened to the donkey that
momentarily distracted their attention. In trying to pass between two
saplings the animal had bumped the ladder against them and brought
itself up with a round turn. But it still struggled forward and kept
up its braying:

"Cotched, by ginger!" shouted old man McGee. He galloped toward the
runaway donkey, but the next moment a curious thing happened.

In pressing forward, the donkey had bent the saplings over with the
ladder until it became entangled in their branches. Suddenly the
animal ceased struggling and the saplings sprang up, no longer having
any pressure on them, and the donkey was fairly lifted from its feet
and carried up into the air. And there he hung, threshing about with
his hoofs and suspended from the ladder. At the same instant the
figure of the professor emerged from the wood. He looked rather
sheepish.

The boys ran up to him.

"What's the matter, professor?" asked Dick.

"Yes, you called for help," added Tom.

"Um--er--ah did I call?" inquired the man of science.

"You certainly did. You scared us almost to death," said Dick.

"Something about lions," added Tom.

"Lions--er--did I say _lions_, boys?"

"You did," Dick assured him.

The professor gave a rather shamefaced smile. He looked at the donkey
suspended from the ladder between the two straightened saplings.

"Um--er--perhaps it would be better to say no more about it," he said.
"I do not suppose that I am the first man to have been scared by a
sheep in wolf's clothing."

"Or a donkey in a lion's skin," chuckled Dick.

In the meantime old man McGee had arrived at the donkey's side and was
scratching his head to think of some way to relieve it from its
predicament. The boys solved the problem for him by cutting the
branches that held the ladder and Mr. Donkey came down to earth. The
professor, with rather a red face, had gone back to his work of
collecting specimens, which the arrival of the long-eared beast had
interrupted in such a startling manner.

"Thar, I hope that's taught you some sense," said old man McGee, as
the donkey was once more on