feelings. If I were only _all_ Knight, now, or even all Mare, I'd be
thankful, but a Knight-mare is an unsatisfactory sort of thing to be."

"A Knight-mare--Oh, how dreadful!" cried Ann, drawing away from him.
"Is _that_ what you are?"

"There! You see how it is!" exclaimed the Knight-mare, tossing his
long black mane. "Nobody's got any sympathy for me. How would _you_
like it? Suppose you were a little girl only as far as your shoulders
and all the rest of you hippopotamus, eh?"

"I wouldn't like it at all," said Ann, after thinking a moment.

"Then no more do I," said the Knight-mare, and sighed a long sad sigh.

"Would you mind telling us how it happened?" asked Rudolf politely.

"Not at all," said the Knight-mare. "You see I was a great boy for
fighting in the old days--though you mightn't think it to see me
now--and I used to ride forth to battle on my coal-black steed, this
very mare whose head I'm wearing now. Well, of course I was a terror
to my enemies, used to scare 'em into fits, and I suppose it was one
of those very fellows that got me into this fix, dreamed me into it
one night, you know, only he got me and my steed mixed. We've stayed
mixed ever since, and the worst of it is I oughtn't to be a Bad Dream
at all. I was the nicest kind of a Good Dream once--why I belonged to
a lady who lived in a castle, and she thought a lot of me, she did!"

"It's too bad," said Rudolf sympathetically; "but isn't there anything
you can do about it?"