houlder, and two pickerel dangling from a crotched stick, espied
something gleaming in the grass by the roadside. He stooped and picked
up a golden coin.

"What luck!" he exclaimed. He put the coin in his pocket and carried it
home. He had a collection of curiosities there, in an old cabinet, that
he valued highly: coins, stamps, birds' nests, queer bits of stone and
odds and ends of stuff. Seeing that the coin was punched, and foreign,
and not available for spending money, he placed it among his treasures.
He was a curiously unsocial youth; had few pleasures that he shared with
his cousins, but gloated over his own acquisitions quietly like a miser.
He rejoiced silently in this new addition to his hoard, and said nothing
about it.

CHAPTER XVII

A STRANGE ADMISSION

The days went by, and summer was near its end. Then, with the vacation
drawing to a close, there came a surprise for Henry Burns, in the form
of a letter from his aunt. It was she with whom he lived, in a
Massachusetts town; but now she wrote that she had decided to spend the
winter in Benton, and that he must enter school there at the fall term,
along with Tom Harris and Bob White. "Then I stay, too," exclaimed Jack
Harvey, when he had read the important news--and he did. The elder
Harvey, communicated with, had no objection; and, indeed, there was a
most satisfactory arrangement made, later, that Jack Harvey should board
with Henry Burns and his aunt; an arrangement highly pleasing to the two
boys, if it added later to the concern and worry of the worthy Miss
Matilda Burns.

The days grew shorter and the nights cool; and, by and by, with much
reluctance, the canoes were hauled ashore for the last time, of an
afternoon, and stored away in a corner of the barn back of the camp; and
fishing tackle for summer use was put carefully aside, also. There were
lessons to be learned, and fewer half-days to be devoted to the sport
for which they cared most.

The pickerel in the stream and the trout in the brook sought deeper
waters, in anticipation of winter. The boys spent less and less of their
time in the vicinity of the old Ellison farm.

Tim and Young Joe Warren stuck mostly by the camp, and drew the others
there on certain select occasions. For Little Tim, by reason of long
roving, had a wonderful knowledge of the resources of the country around
the old stream. He had a beechnut grove that he had discovered, three
miles back from the water, on