n, while I, until a year ago, have always lived at Fairport. Fairport
is a very pretty harbor, but it does not train one for adventures. We
arranged to take our vacation at the same time, and together. At least
Kinney so arranged it. I see a good deal of him, and in looking forward
to my vacation, not the least pleasant feature of it was that everything
connected with Joyce & Carboy and Mrs. Shaw's boarding-house would be
left behind me. But when Kinney proposed we should go together, I could
not see how, without being rude, I could refuse his company, and when
he pointed out that for an expedition in search of adventure I could not
select a better guide, I felt that he was right.

"Sometimes," he said, "I can see you don't believe that half the things
I tell you have happened to me, really have happened. Now, isn't that
so?"

To find the answer that would not hurt his feelings I hesitated, but he
did not wait for my answer. He seldom does.

"Well, on this trip," he went on, "you will see Kinney on the job. You
won't have to take my word for it. You will see adventures walk up and
eat out of my hand."

Our vacation came on the first of September, but we began to plan for
it in April, and up to the night before we left New York we never ceased
planning. Our difficulty was that having been brought up at Fairport,
which is on the Sound, north of New London, I was homesick for a smell
of salt marshes and for the sight of water and ships. Though they
were only schooners carrying cement, I wanted to sit in the sun on
the string-piece of a wharf and watch them. I wanted to beat about the
harbor in a catboat, and feel the tug and pull of the tiller. Kinney
protested that that was no way to spend a vacation or to invite
adventure. His face was set against Fairport. The conversation of
clam-diggers, he said, did not appeal to him; and he complained that at
Fairport our only chance of adventure would be my capsizing the catboat
or robbing a lobster-pot. He insisted we should go to the mountains,
where we would meet what he always calls "our best people." In
September, he explained, everybody goes to the mountains to recuperate
after the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore. To this I objected
that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw's basement
dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety. And so, along
these lines, throughout the sleepless, sultry nights of June, July,
and August, we fought it out. There