sket and a proper scolding. There, too, was the
night when he had stood so steadily by the tiller of the "Swallow,"
while she danced through the dark across the rough waves of the
Atlantic.

But on the whole, Dab Kinzer had been a good sleeper all his life till
then. Once in bed, and there had been an end of all wakefulness.

On that particular night, for the first time, sleep refused to come,
late as was the hour when the family circle broke up. It could not have
been the excitement of Ham's and Miranda's return. He'd have gotten over
that by this time. No more could it have been the fire, though the smell
of the smoldering hay came in pretty strongly, at times, through the
wide-open windows. If any one patch of that great roomy bed was better
made up for sleeping than the rest of it, Dab would surely have found
the spot, for he tumbled and rolled all over it in his restlessness.
Some fields on a farm will "grow" better wheat than others, but no part
of the bed seemed to grow any sleep. At last Dab got wearily up and took
a chair by the window. The night was dark, but the stars were shining,
and every now and then the wind would make a shovel of itself and toss
up the hot ashes the fire had left, sending a dull red glare around on
the house and barns for a moment, and flooding all the neighborhood with
a stronger smell of burnt hay.

"If you're going to burn hay," soliloquized Dab, "it wont do to take a
barn for a stove. Not that kind of a barn. But what did Ham Morris mean
by saying I was to go to boarding-school? That's what I'd like to know."

The secret was out.

He had kept remarkably still, for him, all the evening, and had not
asked a question; but if his brains were ever to work over his books as
they had over Ham's remark, his future chances for sound sleep were all
gone. It had come upon him so suddenly, the very thing he had been
wishing for during all those walks and talks and lessons of all sorts
with Ford Foster and Frank Harley ever since the cruise of the
"Swallow."

It was a wonderful idea, and Dab had his doubts as to the way his mother
would take to it when it should be brought seriously before her. Little
he guessed the truth. Ham's remark had found other ears as well as
Dabney's, and there were reasons, therefore, why good Mrs. Kinzer was
sitting by the window of her own room, at that very moment, as little
inclined to sleep as was the boy she was thinking of. So proud of him,
too, she was,