s the last note he ever
wrote me. I couldn't read it for the tears.

What a pang shot across my heart the afternoon it was whispered through
the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave Point--the place
where we bathed. We bathed there no more! How well I remember the
funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to see his familiar
name on a small headstone in the Old South Burying Ground!

Poor little Binny Wallace! Always the same to me. The rest of us have
grown up into hard, worldly men, fighting the fight of life; but you
are forever young, and gentle, and pure; a part of my own childhood
that time cannot wither; always a little boy, always poor little Binny
Wallace!

Chapter Fifteen--An Old Acquaintance Turns Up

A year had stolen by since the death of Binny Wallace--a year of which I
have nothing important to record.

The loss of our little playmate threw a shadow over our young lives for
many and many a month. The Dolphin rose and fell with the tide at the
foot of the slippery steps, unused, the rest of the summer. At the close
of November we hauled her sadly into the boat-house for the winter; but
when spring came round we launched the Dolphin again, and often went
down to the wharf and looked at her lying in the tangled eel-grass,
without much inclination to take a row. The associations connected with
the boat were too painful as yet; but time, which wears the sharp edge
from everything, softened this feeling, and one afternoon we brought out
the cobwebbed oars.

The ice once broken, brief trips along the wharves--we seldom cared to
go out into the river now--became one of our chief amusements. Meanwhile
Gypsy was not forgotten. Every clear morning I was in the saddle
before breakfast, and there are few roads or lanes within ten miles of
Rivermouth that have not borne the print of her vagrant hoof.

I studied like a good fellow this quarter, carrying off a couple of
first prizes. The Captain expressed his gratification by presenting me
with a new silver dollar. If a dollar in his eyes was smaller than a
cart-wheel, it wasn't so very much smaller. I redeemed my pencil-case
from the treasurer of the Centipedes, and felt that I was getting on in
the world.

It was at this time I was greatly cast down by a letter from my father
saying that he should be unable to visit Rivermouth until the following
year. With that letter came another to Captain Nutter, which he did not
read aloud t