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fine horses, and there are only twenty-four feet among them all." "Twenty four feet!" said Harry; "impossible! You say they are fine horses, and ten of them. Every horse has four feet, and four times ten are forty--that's certain." "Perhaps," said little George, "some of them are a new style of horse; six have the right number of feet, making the twenty-four, and the rest crawl on their bellies, like snakes." "Goodness! how absurd!" exclaimed Arthur. "I have heard of Mr. Barnum's woolly horse, and a saw-horse, and a chestnut horse, and a horse-chestnut; and a flying-horse, and a horse-fly; and a clothes-horse, and a horse-cloth; and a rocking-horse. But a snake-horse is something new." "Give it up?" said Charlie. "Suppose you alter the spelling a little." "Oh! I have it!" shouted Arthur. "The horses had twenty _fore_ feet, and they also had twenty _hind_ feet. That's the best catch I ever heard. Just see, fellows, what comes of being head-boy in spelling-class. I'm the boy for learning! I dare say Dr. Addup is crying his eyes out, because it is vacation, and he won't see me for a month." "I've got twenty-four appetites," said Richard; "when is the plum-pudding coming up?" "The fish for the first course, and here they are," said Charlie. "But I don't like raw fish," said George; "and where is the fire to cook 'em?" "Don't be in a hurry," said the captain. "I'll fix that in a minute; I know all about it--read it in a book; all you have to do, is, to find two sticks, and rub them together, and there's your fire right off." But our young gipsy soon found the difference between a fire with two sticks in a book, and a fire with two sticks in a wood. He rubbed his two sticks together, until _he_ was in a perfect blaze with the exertion, but the blaze he wanted would not come. "Hang the sticks!" he exclaimed; "the people in the books always did it so easily, why can't I?" Luckily for the success of the gipsy party, one of the band just then happened to spy a match, which some chance wanderer had dropped, and a few dry sticks having been hastily collected, a fine fire was soon crackling and snapping merrily. Delighted with their success, they next held a grand consultation, on the noble science of cooking. "The gipsies hang a kettle on forked sticks," said Richard; "and fish, flesh, and fowl are all put in together, making, what I should call, stewed hodge-podge." "Well, there are ninety-nine r
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