They were not so bad-looking a pair, as boys go; although it may be few other people would have seen so much to admire in them as their mother did.

Joe, the elder, was a loud, hoarse-voiced, black-eyed boy, of seventeen or thereabouts, with a perpetual grin on his face, as if he had discovered in this world nothing but a long procession of things to be laughed at.  Foster, so named after his lawyer relative, was a year and a half younger, but nearly as tall as Joe.  He was paler, but with hair and eyes as dark, and he wore a sort of habitual side-look, as if his mind were all the while inquiring if anybody within sight happened to have any thing he wanted.

They both bore a strong likeness to their father, only they missed something bluff and hearty in his accustomed manner; and they each had also a little suggestion of their mother, that did not, however go so far as to put anybody in mind of their aunt Foster.

Nobody need have failed to see, at all events, after watching one or two of their glances at each other, that they were the very boys to play the meanest kind of practical jokes when they could do it safely.  There is really no accounting for boys; and Joe and Fuz, therefore, might fairly be set down among the “unaccountables.”

There was no sort of wonder that their easy-going mother and their joke-admiring father should be quite willing to have them spend three-quarters of the year at boarding-school, and as much as possible of the remainder somewhere else than “at home.”

After Mr. Hart went out to his business that morning, and Mrs. Hart set herself about her usual duties, Joe and Fuz took with them into the street the whole Grantley question.

“We’ll have to go, Fuz.”

“Of course.  But we must have more to eat, and more fun, than we had last time.”

“Ford’s coming, is he?  The little prig!  We’ll roast him.”

“So we will that young missionary.”

“Look out about him, Joe, while he’s at our house.  He’s coming right here, you know.”

“Don’t you be afraid.  His folks are old friends of mother’s.  We’ll let up on him till we get him safe to Grantley.”

“Then we’ll fix him.”

They had plots and plans enough to talk about; but neither they, nor any of the boys they named, nor any of the other boys they did not name, had the least idea of what the future really had in store for them.  Dab Kinzer and Ford Foster, in particular, had no idea that the world contained such a place as Grantley, or such a landlady as Mrs. Myers.

They had as little suspicion of them as they had had of finding Annie Foster in the sitting-room that day, when they walked in with their famous strings of fish.

Ford kissed his sister, but that operation hardly checked him for an instant in his voluble narrative of the stirring events of his first morning on the bay.  There was really little for anybody else to do but to listen, and it was worth hearing.