perplexed
her. Attendants should be bringing forth knockdown fence-panels for her
to leap over and hoops of paper for her rider to leap through. Never
mind; out of her imagination she would supply these missing details when
the proper moment came. She'd hurdle the hurdles which weren't there.
Meanwhile she knew what to do--around and around and around, right
willingly, right blithely went Mittie May.

And, with her, around and around went also Prof. Cephus Fringe, but not
willingly and by no means blithely. He shed his high hat and with it all
lingering essences of his dignity. One of Mittie May's feet squashed
down on the high hat and it folded up like a condensed time-card. He
lost the last vestige of his vanishing authority when he lost his
saxophone. The Professor did not understate the case when he had
intimated that he was somewhat out of practice at equestrian exercises.
Stark terror convulsed his frame; instinct of self-preservation made him
careless of the language he used. Indeed, a good deal of the language he
used was bounced right out of him.

Haply perhaps for him--and surely nothing else that happened was for
him haply circumstanced--most of the naughty words reached no ears save
those of Mittie May. There were sounds which drowned them--sounds which
began with a fluttered outcry of alarm, which progressed to a great gasp
of astonishment, which swelled and rippled into a titter, which grew
into a vast rocking roar of unrestrained joyousness. Children shrieked,
old women cackled, old men wheezed, adults guffawed, strong men rolled
upon the earth in uncontrollable outbursts of thunderous mirth. As
though stricken in all his members, Gumbo Rollins fell alongside his
whirling Flyin' Jinny, but failed not, even in that excess of his
mounting hysteria, to see to it that the steam-driven organ continued to
grind out the one tune of its repertoire. The members of the choir
forgot that their mission was to sing. They were too busy laughing to
sing. And high and clear above the chorus of their glad outcry rose the
soprano gurglings of Ophelia Stubblefield as she leaned for support up
against somebody.

You ask, Why did not Prof. Cephus Fringe fall off of Mittie May? He
tried to. At first he sought only to stay on; then after a bit he sought
to get off; he couldn't. The cause for his staying on was revealed when
Mittie May took the first of those mental hazards of hers. As she rose
grandly into space to clear the