She knew no more until she heard the baying of hounds and the loud cries of the returning hunters. Her father opened the heavy wooden gate, and came in where she was leaning half faint against the wall.
"I am all right now, father," said Dolly, in reply to his anxious interrogation, "but I was kind of sick like a while ago."
She still looked very pale.
"The girl has beat the hull of us!" cried a rough pioneer. "It's the very beast we were arter. See, there's the marks of the hounds' teeth. Well, it's saved us a journey to-morrow; that's a comfort. But you beat the dickens, Dolly, you do."
They all crowded around, offering congratulations, and for weeks afterward her exploit was the talk of the neighborhood.
The panther proved on measurement to be one of the largest of its kind; lacking only an inch of being seven feet in length, including its tail. The State bounty was forty dollars. This sum, with what she realized from its skin, made Dolly quite a rich young lady for those times.
[ROBIN GOODFELLOW.]
BY ELLA RODMAN CHURCH.
"Once upon a time, a great while agoe," begins a strange fairy tale that was written in the days of bad spelling, "there was wont to walke many harmlesse spirits called fayries, dancing in brave order in fayry rings on greene hills with sweete musicke (sometimes invisible), in divers shapes; and many mad prankes would they play."