e done that four times already, Bob."

"Well, I'll do it five times, Tim. There's luck, you know, in odd
numbers."

There was a sharpish curve on the line close to the station. While Bob
Frog was away the train, being five minutes before its time, came
thundering round the curve and rushed alongside the platform.

Bob ran back of course and stood vainly trying to see the people in each
carriage as it went past.

"Oh! _what_ a sweet eager face!" exclaimed Tim, gazing after a young
girl who had thrust her head out of a first-class carriage.

"Let alone sweet faces, Tim--this way. The third classes are all
behind."

By this time the train had stopped, and great was the commotion as
friends and relatives met or said good-bye hurriedly, and bustled into
and out of the carriages--commotion which was increased by the cheering
of a fresh band of rescued waifs going to new homes in the west, and the
hissing of the safety valve which took it into its head at that
inconvenient moment to let off superfluous steam. Some of the people
rushing about on that platform and jostling each other would have been
the better for safety valves! poor Bobby Frog was one of these.

"Not there!" he exclaimed despairingly, as he looked into the last
carriage of the train.

"Impossible," said Tim, "we've only missed them; walk back."

They went back, looking eagerly into carriage after carriage--Bob even
glancing under the seats in a sort of wild hope that his mother might be
hiding there, but no one resembling Mrs Frog was to be seen.

A commotion at the front part of the train, more pronounced than the
general hubbub, attracted their attention.

"Oh! where is he--where is he?" cried a female voice, which was followed
up by the female herself, a respectable elderly woman, who went about
the platform scattering people right and left in a fit of temporary
insanity, "where is my Bobby, where _is_ he, I say? Oh! _why_ won't
people git out o' my way? _Git_ out o' the way," (shoving a sluggish
man forcibly), "where are you, Bobby? Bo-o-o-o-o-by!"

It was Mrs Frog! Bob saw her, but did not move. His heart was in his
throat! He _could_ not move. As he afterwards said, he was struck all
of a heap, and could only stand and gaze with his hands clasped.

"Out o' the _way_, young man!" cried Mrs Frog, brushing indignantly
past him, in one of her erratic bursts. "Oh! Bobby--where _has_ that
boy gone to?"

"Mother!" gasped Bob.

"Wh