rd at work in the scarlet trumpets of the honeysuckle on the
porch,--everywhere the sense of fullness and growth, with no shadow as
yet of rankness or decay. August is over-ripe. September's smile is sad,
but midsummer is all rosy hope, the crown and blossom of the year.

Charley Brush lay under an apple-tree, face downward, and absorbed in
"The Red Rover," a book he had read at least ten times before. Stories
about ships and sea-life and freebooters and buccaneers were his
favorite reading, and, unfortunately, what with illustrated papers and
cheap novels, and so-called "Boys' books," plenty of such tales abound
nowadays. I say unfortunately, for beside teaching him nothing, these
books made Charley utterly dissatisfied with his life at home. Hoeing
vegetables, chopping wood, and going to the district school, seemed dull
work indeed to a boy who was longing to stand sword in hand on a
blood-stained deck, in a gory uniform trimmed with skulls and
cross-bones, and order his enemies to be thrown one by one into the sea.
"The shark awaits your car-casses!" spouted the imaginary desperado with
a vicious snap of his teeth; and when Aunt Greg interrupted by asking
him to bring in an armful of kindling, he glared at her like the Red
Rover himself. Poor Aunt Greg! how little she guessed what was passing
in his mind!

"You look real pale to-day," she said. "I was afraid all that mince-pie
for supper would be bad for you. Here, Charley, I'll mix you some
ginger-and-water. That'll settle you, and make all right again."

"Mis-cre-ant!" was what Charley yearned to say, but instead he muttered,
gruffly, "I aint sick, and I don't want no ginger." Very bad grammar, as
you perceive; but grammar seemed such an unnecessary accomplishment for
a would-be buccaneer, that Charley never could be induced to pay the
least attention to it.

That afternoon, under the apple-tree, he made up his mind. A pirate he
must and he would be, by fair means or by foul. He was cunning enough to
know that the very word "pirate" would frighten his grandmother into
fits, so he only asked her leave to go to sea. Going to sea was, to his
mind, a necessary first step toward the noble profession he desired to
enter.

"I want to so bad," he whined. "Please say I may."

Grandmother began to cry. Aunt Hitty was sure he must be out of his
mind, and ran for the Epsom salts. Aunt Greg quoted, "There's no place
like home," and told a story about a boy she once heard