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