Fall Down Seven Times
- Manjiro decides on a horse race with Tom, the guy who's been riding since he was a kid and whose dad has the fastest horse around.
- Terry and Job know Manjiro—who still can't stay on a horse—needs help, so they start after-school riding practices immediately.
- They only have two weeks to teach Manjiro how to ride a horse.
- Manjiro starts to feel the pressure of the race, too, and he starts to hope that something will happen to him so that he won't need to race Tom.
- The whole school knows about the race now, so that means Catherine—the girl he met on the first day of school—might see him get humiliated, which would just totally stink.
- At one of their practices, Manjiro continues to keep falling off of Duffy; on the final fall (into a pile of straw), Manjiro gets up laughing.
- The other boys aren't laughing—after all, Manjiro keeps falling—but Manjiro just repeats an adage his mother used to tell him: "Fall down seven times, get up eight" (3.21.24).