three rousing cheers
for Mark Elmer, and three more for Ruth Elmer, and then three times
three for both of them.

The stage stopped, and in another instant Ruth was hugging and kissing,
and being hugged and kissed, by her "very dearest, darlingest friend"
Edna May, and Mark was being slapped on the back and hauled this way
and that, and was shaking hands with all the boys in Norton.

CHAPTER XIX.

UNCLE CHRISTOPHER'S "GREAT SCHEME."

How pleasant it was to be in dear old Norton again! and how glad
everybody was to see them! Good old Mrs. Wing said it made her feel
young again to have boys in the house. She certainly had enough of them
now; for the Norton boys could not keep away from Mark. From early
morning until evening boys walked back and forth in front of the house
waiting for him to appear, or sat on the fence-posts and whistled for
him. Some walked boldly up to the front door, rang the bell, and asked
if he were in; while others, more shy, but braver than those who
whistled so alluringly from the fence-posts, stole around through the
garden at the side of the house, and tried to catch a glimpse of him
through the windows.

All this was not because Mark kept himself shut up in the house. Oh no!
he was not that kind of a boy. He only stayed in long enough to sleep,
to eat three meals a day, and to write letters to his father, mother,
and Frank March, telling them of everything that was taking place. The
rest of the time he devoted to the boys--and the girls; for he was over
at Captain May's house almost as much as he was at the Wings'. He was
enjoying himself immensely, though it didn't seem as though he was
doing much except to talk.

If he went fishing with the boys, they would make him tell how he and
Frank caught the alligator, or how the alligator caught Frank, and how
he killed it; and when he finished it was time to go home, and none of
them had even thought of fishing since Mark began to talk.

There was nothing the boys enjoyed more than going out into the woods,
making believe that some of the great spreading oaks were palm-trees,
and lying down under them and listening, while Mark, at their earnest
request, told over and over again the stories of the wreck on the
Florida reef, and the picnic his father and mother and Ruth and he had
under the palm-trees, or of hunting deer at night through the solemn,
moss-hung, Southern forests, or of the burning of the Wildfire.

"I say, Mark," exclai