ER XXVIII.
AN UNUSUAL AMOUNT OF INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER XXIX.
LETTERS HOME FROM THE BOYS.--DICK LEE'S FIRST GRIEF.

CHAPTER XXX.
DABNEY KINZER TRIES FRESH-WATER FISHING FOR THE FIRST TIME.

CHAPTER XXXI.
A FIGHT, AND WHAT CAME OF IT.

CHAPTER XXXII.
OLD FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS OF HIS COME TO VISIT DABNEY.

DAB KINZER

CHAPTER I.

THE KINZER FARM, THE NEW SUIT, AND THE WEDDING.

Between the village and the inlet, and half a mile from the great "bay,"
lay the Kinzer farm. Beyond the bay was a sandbar, and beyond that the
Atlantic Ocean; for all this was on the southerly shore of Long Island.

The Kinzer farm had lain right there--acre for acre, no more, no
less--on the day when Hendrik Hudson long ago sailed the good ship "Half
Moon" into New-York Bay. But it was not then known to any one as the
Kinzer farm. Neither was there then, as now, any bright and growing
village crowding up on one side of it, with a railway-station and a
post-office. Nor was there, at that time, any great and busy city of New
York, only a few hours' ride away, over on the island of Manhattan. The
Kinzers themselves were not there then. But the bay and the inlet, with
the fish and the crabs, and the ebbing and flowing tides, were there,
very much the same, before Hendrik Hudson and his brave Dutchmen knew
any thing whatever about that corner of the world.

The Kinzer farm had always been a reasonably "fat" one, both as to size
and quality; and the good people who lived on it had generally been of a
somewhat similar description. It was, therefore, every way correct and
becoming for Dabney Kinzer's widowed mother and his sisters to be the
plump and hearty beings they were, and all the more discouraging to poor
Dabney that no amount of regular and faithful eating seemed to make him
resemble them at all in that respect.

Mrs. Kinzer excused his thinness, to her neighbors, to be sure, on the
ground that he was "such a growing boy;" but, for all that, he caught
himself wondering, now and then, if he would never be done with that
part of his trials. For rapid growth has its trials.

"The fact is," he said to himself one day, as he leaned over the north
fence, "I'm more like Ham Morris's farm than I am like ours. His farm is
bigger than ours, all round; but it's too big for its fences, just as
I'm too big for my clothes. Ham's house is three times as large as ours,
but it looks as if it had grown too fast. It hasn't any paint to spe