"Yours was a perfect beauty, Dot.

What a fuss you make!" As Dotty had all this while been stifling her groans of pain, and had also been careful not to express a hundredth part of her real terror of lightning, she thought her friend's words were, to say the least, a little severe.
"Why, this is queer," cried Jennie, stopping short.

"It's growing wet here; haven't you noticed it?
Now I've thought of something.

There's a bog in this town, _somewhere_, so awful and deep that once a boy slumped into it, don't you think, up to his waist; and the more he tried to get out the more he couldn't; and there he was, slump, slump, and got in as far as his neck.

And he screamed till he was black and blue; and when they went to him there wasn't a bit of him out but the end of his nose, and he couldn't scream any more; so all they could do was to pull him out by the hair of his head." "Is that a true story, now, honest ?" cried Dotty, wringing her hands.
"How dreadful, dreadful, dreadful! What shall we do ?" "Do ?" was the demure reply; "stand as stock-still as ever we can, and try not to shake when we breathe.