til it becomes maddening. Is that all of that
melodious, entrancing production?"

"No, evening comes yet. The last verse goes this way:

"'When the busy day's employ, ends at dewy eve,
Then the happy farmer boy, doth haste his work to leave,
Trudging down the quiet lane, climbing o'er the hill,
Whistling back the changeless wail, of plaintive whip-poor-will,'--

and then you do the chorus again, and if you know how well enough you
whistle in, 'whip-poor-will,' 'til the birds will answer you. Laddie
often makes them."

"My life!" cried the Princess. "Was that he doing those bird cries?
Why, I hunted, and hunted, and so did father. We'd never seen a
whip-poor-will. Just fancy us!"

"If you'd only looked at Laddie," I said.

"My patience!" cried the Princess. "Looked at him! There was no place
to look without seeing him. And that ear-splitting thing will ring in
my head forever, I know."

"Did he whistle it too high to suit you, Princess?"

"He was perfectly welcome to whistle as he chose," she said, "and also
to plow with the carriage horses, and to bedeck them and himself with
the modest, shrinking red tulip and yellow daffodil."

Now any one knows that tulips and daffodils are NOT modest and
shrinking. If any flowers just blaze and scream colour clear across a
garden, they do. She was provoked, you could see that.

"Well, he only did it to please you," I said. "He didn't care anything
about it. He never plowed that way before. But you said he mustn't
plow at all, and he just had to plow, there was no escaping that, so he
made it as fine and happy as possible to show you how nicely it could
be done."

"Greatly obliged, I'm sure!" cried the Princess. "He showed me! He
certainly did! And so he feels that there's 'no escaping' plowing,
does he?"

Then I knew where I was. I'd have given every cent of mine in father's
chest till, if mother had been in my place. Once, for a second, I
thought I'd ask the Princess to go with me to the house, and let mother
tell her how it was; but if she wouldn't go, and rode away, I felt I
couldn't endure it, and anyway, she had said she was looking for me; so
I gripped the shingle, dug in my toes and went at her just as nearly
like mother talked to her father as I could remember, and I'd been put
through memory tests, and descriptive tests, nearly every night of my
life, so I had most of it as straight as a string.

"Well, you see, he CAN'T escape it