entered the Twenty-third Street ferry house.

"All right. But let me get the tickets," said Mr. Horton, feeling in
his pocket for change.

Sunny Boy was so short that he walked under the turnstile instead of
through it, and the ticket man laughed when he saw him do it.

"Look out one of the sea gulls doesn't take you for a bite of
breakfast," he called jokingly after him.

"Huh," Sunny Boy said resentfully to Mother, "I'm not so little. I
know lots of children littler than I am. Wonder what he'd say if he
saw Lottie Saunders going through his gate."

Lottie Saunders was a little friend of Sunny Boy's at home. She was
not quite three years old.

There was a crowd of people waiting to get on the ferryboat and for a
few minutes the Hortons had to stand at the closed door while the
people on the boat walked off. There were a great many automobiles and
horses and wagons and trucks coming off, too, and the drivers did a
deal of shouting.

"Everybody's in a hurry," observed Sunny Boy, when the door was at
last slid back and the crowd started to jostle its way on board.

Crowds are always in a hurry, if you have noticed it. They run and
push and scramble to get somewhere, and then, when they are there,
they sit down and rest or stand about contentedly, quite as though
they did not know what hurrying meant.

"What do they do with the ropes?" asked Sunny Boy, as they went down
the inclined plank and stepped on the ferryboat deck.

"They're what hold the boat in the slip," explained Mr. Horton. "If we
stay on this back deck till the boat moves, you'll see the men take
out those great hooks and wind the ropes on those wheels. Do you want
to see them do it?"

Sunny Boy did, of course, and he waited till the gates were closed and
the ropes loosened. Then two men, one on either side of the wharf, or
slip, as they call the docks built for this kind of boat, gave a large
spiked wheel one long, powerful turn, and it spun round rapidly,
coiling up the ropes.

"Now we'll go up to the front," announced Mr. Horton, "and see what
ails that noisy little tugboat we hear."

But Sunny Boy had made a discovery.

"Oh, Daddy!" he shouted. "There's a top! Let's go up!"

Mrs. Horton laughed.

"I'm sure Sunny will be an aviator when he grows up," she declared,
smiling at her little boy. "He always wants to get as near to the sky
as he can."

Sunny Boy was eager to climb the stairs to the second deck of the
ferryboat, and he prom