Wouldn't it be impolite to wink at a horse, too, Aggie?" asked the
puzzled Dot. "Don't you think Scalawag would feel he was insulted if I
wunk at him?"

"Oh, my eye!" gasped Neale, who chanced to be at hand. "Wink, wank,
wunk. Great declension, kid."

"Don't call me 'kid'!" cried Dot. "I am sure _that_ is not polite, Neale
O 'Neil."

"Discovered, Neale!" chuckled Agnes.

"You are right, Dottie," said the boy, with a twinkle in his eye. "And
to repay you for my slip in manners, I will aid you in transposing that
sentence so that your teacher will scarcely recognize it."

And he did so. It greatly delighted Dot, for she did so love
polysyllables. The other members of the family were convulsed when they
read Neale's effort. The little girl carried the paper to school the
next day and the amazed teacher read the following paraphrase of "A wink
is as good as a nod to a blind horse:"

"A spasmodic movement of the eye is as adequate as a slight motion of
the cranium to an equine quadruped devoid of its visionary capacities."

"Goodness!" Tess declared when she had heard this read over several
times. "I don't think you would better read that to Scalawag, Dot. It
would make any horse mad."

"Scalawag isn't a horse," responded her sister. "He's a pony. And Neale
says he'll never grow up to be a horse. He's just always going to be our
cute, cunning little Scalawag!"

"But suppose," sighed Tess, thoughtfully, "that he ever acts like that
brown pony of Mrs. Heard's. Jonas, you know."

"Oh, Jonas! He is a _bad_ pony. He gets stuck and won't go," Dot said.
"Our Scalawag wouldn't do that."

"He balks, Dot--balks," reproved Tess. "He doesn't get stuck."

"I don't care. You can't push him, and you can't pull him. He just
stands."

"Until our Neale whispers something in his ear," suggested Tess.

"Oh, my!" exclaimed her little sister. "Suppose Scalawag _should_ be
taken that way. What _would_ we do? We don't know what Neale whispered
to Mrs. Heard's pony."

"That's so," agreed Tess. "And Neale won't tell me. I've asked him, and
_asked_ him! He was never so mean about anything before."

But Neale, with a reassuring smile, told the little girls that Scalawag
would never need to be whispered to. In fact, whispering to the calico
pony would merely be a waste of time.

"There's nothing the matter with the old villain but inborn laziness,"
the youth chuckled. "You have to shout to Scalawag, not whisper to him."

"Oh!" mur