the
same place. Once, she says, she came down on his neck, and several times
she was back somewhere about his tail. Every time she landed, wherever
it might be, he gave a heave and sent her up again. She tried to say
"Whoa," but it came out in pieces, so to speak, and the creature seemed
to be encouraged by it and took to going faster. By that time, she said,
she wasn't coming down at all, but was in the air all the time, with the
horse coming up at the rate of fifty revolutions a second. She had
presence of mind enough to keep her mouth shut so she wouldn't bite her
tongue off.

After four times round the music stopped and the horse did also. They
were just in front of us, and Tish looked rather dazed.

"You did splendidly!" said Aggie. "Honestly, Tish, I was frightened at
first, but you and that dear horse seemed one piece. Didn't they,
Lizzie?"

Tish straightened out the fingers of her left hand with her right and
extricated the lines. Then she turned her head slowly from right to left
to see if she could.

"Help me down, somebody," she said in a thin voice, "and call an
osteopath. There is something wrong with my spine!"

She was in bed three days, having massage and a vibrator and being
rubbed with chloroform liniment. At the end of that time she offered me
her divided skirt, but I refused.

"Riding would be good for your liver, Lizzie," she said, sitting up in
bed with pillows all about her.

"I don't intend to detach it to do it good," I retorted. "What your
liver and mine and most of the other livers need these days isn't to be
sent out in a divided skirt and beaten to a jelly: they need rest--less
food and simpler food. If instead of taking your liver on a horse you'd
put it in a tent and feed it nuts and berries, you wouldn't be the color
you are to-day, Tish Carberry."

That really started the whole thing, although at the time Tish said
nothing. She has a way of getting an idea and letting it simmer on the
back of her brain, as you may say, when nobody knows it's been cooking
at all, and then suddenly bringing it out cooked and seasoned and ready
to serve.

On the day Tish sat up for the first time, Aggie and I went over to see
her. Hannah, the maid, had got her out of bed to a window, and Tish was
sitting there with books all about her. It is in times of enforced
physical idleness that most of Tish's ideas come to her, and Aggie had
reminded me of that fact on the way over.

"You remember, Lizz