Straight for the wood the donkey raced, kicking up its heels and braying loudly.  It dashed in among the trees of the willow wood and at the same instant there came an appalling yell from among the trees.

“Gracious, what’s happened now!” gasped Tom, and then catching Dick’s laughing eye, he exclaimed: 

“Dick, this is some of your work!”

“Maybe,” said Dick, still choking with laughter, “but what on earth is happening in the wood?”

“Help!  Lions!  Help!  They’re after me!  Help!”

The cries came thick and fast.

“It’s the professor,” choked out Dick.

“He says there are lions in there,” cried Tom, looking rather alarmed, but at this juncture something happened to the donkey that momentarily distracted their attention.  In trying to pass between two saplings the animal had bumped the ladder against them and brought itself up with a round turn.  But it still struggled forward and kept up its braying: 

“Cotched, by ginger!” shouted old man McGee.  He galloped toward the runaway donkey, but the next moment a curious thing happened.

In pressing forward, the donkey had bent the saplings over with the ladder until it became entangled in their branches.  Suddenly the animal ceased struggling and the saplings sprang up, no longer having any pressure on them, and the donkey was fairly lifted from its feet and carried up into the air.  And there he hung, threshing about with his hoofs and suspended from the ladder.  At the same instant the figure of the professor emerged from the wood.  He looked rather sheepish.

The boys ran up to him.

“What’s the matter, professor?” asked Dick.

“Yes, you called for help,” added Tom.

“Um—­er—­ah did I call?” inquired the man of science.

“You certainly did.  You scared us almost to death,” said Dick.

“Something about lions,” added Tom.

“Lions—­er—­did I say lions, boys?”

“You did,” Dick assured him.

The professor gave a rather shamefaced smile.  He looked at the donkey suspended from the ladder between the two straightened saplings.

“Um—­er—­perhaps it would be better to say no more about it,” he said.  “I do not suppose that I am the first man to have been scared by a sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

“Or a donkey in a lion’s skin,” chuckled Dick.

In the meantime old man McGee had arrived at the donkey’s side and was scratching his head to think of some way to relieve it from its predicament.  The boys solved the problem for him by cutting the branches that held the ladder and Mr. Donkey came down to earth.  The professor, with rather a red face, had gone back to his work of collecting specimens, which the arrival of the long-eared beast had interrupted in such a startling manner.

“Thar, I hope that’s taught you some sense,” said old man McGee, as the donkey was once more on terra firma.  As he rode off, Dick burst into shouts of laughter.  His little joke had certainly turned out to be better than he expected and for many days after that he had only to slyly introduce some talk about a lion to cause the professor to look at him in a very quizzical way.