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like that one over there.” Trixie pointed to a boy lying prone on the bank, his eyes never leaving his boat, just launched.
    “He makes me think of Stuart Little in E. B. White’s book,” Honey said. “Remember how he sailed the schooner Wasp to beat the big racing sloop?”
    “He sailed ‘straight and true,’ ” Trixie quoted, “and sent the sloop yawing all over the water.”
    “Everyone was so surprised to see a mouse at the helm,” Honey said, laughing. “They kept yelling, ‘Atta mouse! Atta mouse!’ ”
    “He had a terrible time before he ever made port,” Mart remembered. “The water was rough; the wind was blowing up a gale.”
    “I wish the wind were blowing today,” Bob said, looking around him. “We’d see some action with those sails all filled. Gosh, do we have to leave?”
    “I’m afraid we do,” Trixie told him. “We have miles to go and many, many other things to see.”
    Reluctantly they went back to the carriages, where they found both cabbies "relaxing while the horses chomped at the feed bags.
    “I never saw a park so full of statues,” Barbara said as the older cabbie sat up and rubbed his eyes. “There’s one of Hans Christian Andersen, of the Ugly Duckling, the Mad Hatter, and Alice in Wonderland, and—”
    “Statues?” the driver repeated. “Yes, statues. It’s a queer thing, though. You’ll not see a sign of a statue of William Cullen Bryant, him that thought up the whole idea of Central Park.”
    “William Cullen Bryant?” Trixie remembered her English class at Sleepyside. “He was a Massachusetts poet.”
    “He was born there,” the cab driver corrected her. “But for fifty years he lived right here in New York. He edited the best newspaper New York ever had, the Post. In an editorial, way back in the eighties, he spoke out for a city park where people could breathe clean air. The idea caught on, and all this land was bought piece by piece. It cost a fabulous sum... about seven million dollars. Today this very same land is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A pity they never put up a statue to the greatest poet that ever lived.”
    “Dad always said if you want any information, ask a hansom cab driver or the driver of a taxicab,” Jim whispered to the others. “Shall we go to the zoo now?”
    “Gosh, yes!” Bob said.
    “Then, if it’s all right with the rest of you, we’ll go out of the park at Seventy-ninth Street, down Fifth Avenue, driver, and back into the park at the zoo.”
    “Right-o, laddie!” the old cabbie said and led off with his carriage.
    Trixie sat down in the second cab, next to Mart. She wriggled around, stood up again, looked back at the crowd around the pond, sat down again, then turned her body completely around.
    “What’s the matter with you?” Mart asked disgustedly. “Don’t you think the driver knows where he’s going? What is the matter?”
    “I don’t want to tell you. You’re always making fun of everything I say.”
    “Did you think you saw someone you knew back there?” Jim asked in a low voice.
    “Yes, Jim,” Trixie replied soberly. “Those men we saw at the antique shop window, the ones who followed us last night.”
    “Where?”
    “Over on the bridle path, parallel to this road. Can’t you see them? Oh, bother! They’re gone now.”
    The carriages had reached the edge of the park. The driver pulled up his horse and waited for a chance to slip alongside the Fifth Avenue traffic.
    Just as he saw his opportunity, just as he turned his horse south, two rough-looking men shot out of the park and caught his horse’s reins. The frightened animal reared, whinnying loudly. The abrupt stop almost tumbled the driver from his seat.
    Trixie and Jim rose in the carriage to help him, but as Trixie stepped from the cab, she was tripped. She stumbled and fell to the pavement. One of the strange men swooped down and tried to pry her purse from her arm. With a quick uppercut, Jim sent the man sprawling. Rubbing