ny 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 anything 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 speak of, nor any blinds. It looks a good deal as if
somebody'd just built it there and then forgot it and gone off and
left it out-of-doors."

Dabney's four sisters had all come into the world before him, but he
was as tall as any of them, and was frequently taken by strangers for
a good two years older than he really was.

It was sometimes very hard for him, a boy of fifteen, to live up to
what was expected of those two extra years.

Mrs. Kinzer still kept him in roundabouts; but they did not seem to
hinder his growth at all, if that was her object in so doing.

There was no such thing, however, as keeping the four girls in
roundabouts, of any kind; and, what between them and their mother, the
pleasant and tidy little Kinzer homestead, with its snug parlor and
its cozy bits of rooms and chambers, seemed to nestle away, under the
shadowing elms and sycamor