The result justified my agreeable expectations. I felt myself rising! I kept on rising faster and faster, straining every nerve in the tremendous effort. In this manner I lifted myself clean out of that twenty-five-foot well, and fell, panting and exhausted, upon the solid earth, my strength failing me just as I was fully and fairly above ground.
If the skeptical reader doesn’t believe this I can show him the well.
CHAPTER II.
FIDO TO THE RESCUE.
Despite my narrow escape from a watery grave, my larder for adventure was not dampened in the least, and so, with my little dog percolating at my heels, I tramped onward throughout the remainder of that night, with my face set toward Boston.
Morning came at last. I was far from home when dawn broke across the wold. (I use the word “wold” instead of world because it sounds more poetic, and I am naturally of a highly poetic extinction.) Little birds began to carol in the wayside thickets, crickets cricked in the grass, in a near-by marsh frogs were celebrating morning mass in a masterly manner, and eventually the sun rose into a sky as blue as a poker player who has bet his last blooming chip on four kings and found that some other crook at the table holds four aces.
It was a beautiful morning, but, having been born with a decided penchant for food, without which I have unfortunately, up to the present date, found it quite difficult to subsist, I had no eye for the beauties of the universe scattered around me. My stomach was hollow.
I knew that little Fido must also be hungry, although he had bravely refrained from saying so.
I knocked at the door of a house, and a kind lady came out and asked me what I wanted. I told her I was that flemished that I knew I could find nutriment even in the hole of a doughnut, which I would demonstrate to her satisfaction if she had a few doughnut holes to spare.
At first the lady was somewhat suspicious. She asked me for my name and pedigree. I told her my name was Johnny Jones, but that I had carelessly mislaid my pedigree, and lost the blame thing. In order to allay her suspicions, I related a pathetic tale about a great-grandmother who was dying in Boston, and whose bedside I hoped to reach before the doctors could finish her.