*** I am not sure if anyone will even like this story, but please review and tell me if I should continue and where you want this story to go, please also read my other Fic " A New Year"… thanks!*** I WILL DEVELOP THE PLOT SOON SO DO NOT SAY IT IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE*** I don't own ANYTHING …don't sue.***

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**DO NOT COPY MY IDEA*** I do not own anything** *** 

** I changed a whole lot of things about the story... I recommend you go back and read it over to see the changes... sorry***

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                                               Prairie Lakes, 1893

            "Lizzie! Lizzie, the most amazing, incredible, marvelous thing happened to me today," Miranda said

            Lizzie looked up from the book she was reading under a tree. Her father said it was to cold to be reading outside, but Lizzie was bundled up in heavy woolen clothing and thick gloves that she had to remove each time she wanted to turn a page. This was her favorite spot. It was so peaceful by the lake, the first few fallen leaves floating on the water, a light, crisp breeze blowing through the trees. Old Abraham, one of the farm hands who helped her father, had come by earlier, smiling his missing-tooth smile, to say that if he could read, he would surely do it in a beautiful spot like this. Lizzie knew Abe had been a slave, and that he'd gained his freedom after the Civil War, right around the time her mother came to American. When Abe was a boy, no one had thought he was important enough to teach him to read.

            "Perhaps you'd like me to teach you" Lizzie had volunteered shyly. It wasn't the first time the thought had occurred to her. It had warmed Lizzie to see Abe's lined face light up like a child's as he nodded him head eagerly.

"Would you Miss Elizabeth? Would you really?" He had asked her excitedly.

            "Of course!" Lizzie had said. She couldn't imagine not being able to sit quietly with a book. It was one of the most pleasurable things she could think of. She had told him they would have their first lesson the following day.

            Now she put down her book as Miranda plopped down under the tree with her. She noticed her sister smelled vaguely of wood and must.

            "Did they put you to work chopping wood at the circus, Miranda?"

Miranda's brow furrowed,

            "Chopping wood? Why would you think-oh? No. No, of course not.  That hardly falls under the category of amazing, incredible, and marvelous does It.?" Miranda went right on to the second question without waiting for an answer to the first. "So, don't you want to know what happened?"

            "Hmm, amazing, incredible, and marvelous" Said Lizzie. "It sounds like you spend a day at the circus. Just like yesterday and the day before."

            "Well yes, of course I did." There was a note of impatience in Miranda's voice. "But something different happened today."

            "OK. What?" Lizzie asked. She could see that Miranda couldn't stand to hold back her news a second longer.

            "I met the new bareback rider, Suzanne Silver." Miranda burst.

            "Really? The one with the long curly hair?" Lizzie asked. "She was awfully good, wasn't she?  Every time she jumped through one of those dangling hoops, I held my breath for fear she might not land back on the horse again. So you met her. Did you actually talk to her too?"

Miranda nodded excitedly, "And that's not all. Lizzie, this is the most fantastic. You won't believe it. I got to ride for her. Suzanne watched me walk bareback, the way I have been practicing. And guess what? She says I have talent. She says I could learn to ride the way she does. She really said that!" Miranda's eyes were sparkling like stars.

            "Miranda, that's wonderful," Lizzie exclaimed "Imagine it, my best friend, riding for a circus star."

            "Imagine it, you best friend being a circus star," Miranda said. "Oh, Lizzie, I think it might be possible- the biggest dream in my whole life comes true."

            Rain beat on the rood. Lizzie turned over on her straw mattress. She opened one eye. Slowly, sleepily, the wooden ceiling beams came into view. Weak gray light filtered in through the bedroom window. Poor Miranda, Lizzie thought. What nasty weather on a day she will already be so sad.  The circus had pulled out of town that morning. Lizzie dimly remembered the trains whistle punctuating her dreams. She turned her head to see if Miranda was awake. She was on her side of the bed. Lizzie pushed off the evening-star-pattern quilt she had spent all summer sewing and sat up. Miranda had probably been awakened by the circus train whistle also and been to upset to go back to sleep. Lizzie slid into her slipper and wooly robe. She would try to cheer her up. She looked for Miranda on the parlor sofa, and then in the kitchen. She was about to go peek her head out the front door when a leaf of paper on the kitchen table caught her eye.  It was covered in Miranda's bold hand, the black ink splotchy, as if she had been in a hurry.

            Dearest Elizabeth, Mama, Papa, and Matt, it read. Please do not be unhappy. I have joined up with the circus as a bareback rider.

            Lizzie's cry echoed through the house. The note fluttered to the ground before she even finished reading it.