s no door there anywhere;
nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried to
shrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw his
wide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and the
doctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:

"He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled," and he got out his
lancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: "Pony, Pony! What's the
matter? Have you got the nightmare?" and he woke up, and found it was
just morning.

The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to think
that by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, that
he hardly knew what to do.

He was not very well for two or three days afterward, and his mother let
him stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick or
not. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he had
been going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened to
think of it plagued him a little and asked how he liked being a circus
actor.

Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician got
scared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men that
they would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reason
why they didn't take him. Archy Hawkins said: "How long did you have to
wait on the front steps, Pony dear?" But after that he was pretty good
to him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretend
that Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see.

Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on the
front steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed all
of it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried to
help him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he had
overslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way he
said, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and how
much was not.

JIM LEONARD'S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

Jim Leonard's stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on a
rise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard's log-cabin. The boys called
it Jim Leonard's log-cabin, but it was really his mother's, and the
stable was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable began
the logs stopped, and it was weather-boarded the rest of the way, and
the roof was shingled.

Jim Leonard said it was all logs onc