"Tally-ho," and that is something about fox hunting,
not a coach, and the horse jumped a fence and dad rolled off over the
bowsprit and went into a ditch of dirty water.

[Illustration: Dad rolled off over the bowsprit 128]

The horse went off across a field, and the policeman fished dad out of
the ditch, and run him through a clothes wringer or something, and got
him dried out, and sent him to the hotel in an express wagon, and I rode
my horse back to the liveryman and told him what happened to dad, and
they locked me up in a box stall until somebody found the horse, 'cause
they thought dad was a horse thief, and they held me for ransom. But dad
came around before night and paid my ransom, and we were released. Dad
says Rotten Row is rotten, all right enough, and by ginger it is, 'cause
he has not got the smell of that ditch off his clothes yet.

Now he has got a new idea, and that is to go to some country where there
are bandits, different from the bandits here in London, and be captured
and taken to the mountain fastnesses, and held for ransom until our
government makes a fuss about it, and sends warships after-us. I tell
dad it would be just our luck to have our government fail to try to get
us, and the bandits might cut our heads off and stick them on a pole
as a warning to people not to travel unless they had a ransom concealed
about their clothes. But dad says he is out to see all the sights, and
he is going to be ransomed before he gets home, if it takes every dollar
our government has got. I think he is going to work the bandit racket
when we get to Turkey, but, by ginger, he can leave me at a convent,
because I don't want one of those crooked sabers run into me and turned
around like a corkscrew. Dad says I can stay in a harem while he goes to
the mountains with the bandits, and I don't know as I care, as they say
a harem is the most interesting place in Turkey. You know the pictures
we have studied in the old grocery, where a whole bunch of beautiful
women are practicing using soap in a marble bath.

Well, don't you say anything to ma about it, but dad has got his foot
in it clear up to the top button. It isn't anything scandalous, though
there is a woman at the bottom of it. You see, we used to know a girl
that left home to go out into the world and earn her own living. She
elocuted some at private parties and sanitariums, to entertain people
that were daffy, and were on the verge of getting permanent bat