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 beheaded them, one by one, and poured red lemonade over the snake-lady, who promptly came to, and cried over him, and amid more cheering presented him with twelve chocolate mice, which he was most woefully anxious to eat before the sun melted them.

And all of this seemed natural and decorous to the wakening Lonely, for he was invariably the hero of his own dreams, and as invariably came off with flying colors—except when he ate too many green things and thereby suffered from colic and nightmare. In fact, Lonely was debating whether or not to accept the snake-lady's offer of marriage, when he fully awoke and found himself half out of bed and his mother calling in to him that Gilead had broken out and was in the Gutbills' garden again.

Such a dream. Lonely felt, was augury of an auspicious day. And, in fact, he had scarcely eaten the second canal through his plateful of corn-meal mush—Lonely always ate his porridge first into two canals, and a lake in the middle, just as he always made animals when he poured his molasses over it at first—when some one whistled and hey-ohed to him over the back fence.