ell a lie. This is a story
you could tell to the heathen, and feel that you were teaching them
the truth and doing them good. They give this story out at all the
Sunday-schools in our part of the country, and draw moral lessons from
it. It is a story that a little child can believe.

It happened in the old crinoline days. My aunt, who was then living in a
country-town, had gone out shopping one morning, and was standing in the
High Street, talking to a lady friend, a Mrs. Gumworthy, the doctor's
wife. She (my aunt) had on a new crinoline that morning, in which,
to use her own expression, she rather fancied herself. It was
a tremendously big one, as stiff as a wire-fence; and it "set"
beautifully.

They were standing in front of Jenkins', the draper's; and my aunt
thinks that it--the crinoline--must have got caught up in something,
and an opening thus left between it and the ground. However this may
be, certain it is that an absurdly large and powerful bull-dog, who was
fooling round about there at the time, managed, somehow or other, to
squirm in under my aunt's crinoline, and effectually imprison himself
beneath it.

Finding himself suddenly in a dark and gloomy chamber, the dog,
naturally enough, got frightened, and made frantic rushes to get out.
But whichever way he charged; there was the crinoline in front of
him. As he flew, he, of course, carried it before him, and with the
crinoline, of course, went my aunt.

But nobody knew the explanation. My aunt herself did not know what had
happened. Nobody had seen the dog creep inside the crinoline. All that
the people did see was a staid and eminently respectable middle-aged
lady suddenly, and without any apparent reason, throw her umbrella down
in the road, fly up the High Street at the rate of ten miles an hour,
rush across it at the imminent risk of her life, dart down it again on
the other side, rush sideways, like an excited crab, into a
grocer's shop, run three times round the shop, upsetting the whole
stock-in-trade, come out of the shop backward and knock down a postman,
dash into the roadway and spin round twice, hover for a moment,
undecided, on the curb, and then away up the hill again, as if she had
only just started, all the while screaming out at the top of her voice
for somebody to stop her!

Of course, everybody thought she was mad. The people flew before her
like chaff before the wind. In less than five seconds the High Street
was a desert. The to