“It’s just the best arrangement that could have been made, Maria, all around,” said he.  “Write at once, and tell her she may keep him as long as she pleases.”

That was very well for them, but the boys hardly felt the same way about it.  They had been planning to have “all sorts of fun with that young missionary,” in their own house.  He was, as Fuz expressed it, to be “put through a regular course of sprouts, and take the Hindu all out of him.”

“Never mind, though,” said Joe, after the letter came, and the decision of their parents was declared:  “we’ll serve him out after we get to Grantley.  There won’t be anybody to interfere with the fun.”

“Well, yes,” replied Fuz, “and I’d just as lief not see too much of him before that.  He won’t have any special claim on us, neither, if he doesn’t go there from our house.”

That was a queer sort of calculation, but it was only a beginning.  They had other talks on the same subject, and the tone of them all had in it a promise of lively times at Grantley for the friendless young stranger from India.

Others, however, were thinking of the future, as well as themselves; and Joe and Fuz furnished the subject for more than one animated discussion among the boys down there by the Long Island shore.  Ford Foster gave his two friends the full benefit of all he knew concerning his cousins.

“It’s a good thing for you,” he said to Frank, “that the steamer didn’t go ashore anywhere near their house.  They’re a pair of born young wreckers.  Just think of the tricks they played on my sister Annie!”

They were all related in Ford’s most graphic style, with comments to suit from his audience.  After that conversation, however, it was remarkable what good attention Dab Kinzer and Frank Harley paid to their sparring-lessons.  It even exceeded the pluck and perseverance with which Dab worked at his French; and Ford was compelled to admit, to him in particular, “You ought to have a grown-up teacher,—­somebody you won’t kill if you make out to get in a hit on him.  You’re too long in the reach for me, and your arms are too hard.”

What between the boxing-gloves and the boat, there could be no question but what Frank Harley had landed at the right place to get strong in.

There was plenty of fishing, bathing, riding, boating, boxing:  if they had worked day and night, they could not have used it all up.  Three boys together can find so much more to do than one can, all alone; and they made it four as often as they could, for Dick Lee had proved himself the best kind of company.  Frank Harley’s East-Indian experience had made him indifferent to the mere question of color, and Ford Foster was too much of a “man” to forget that long night of gale and fog and danger on board “The Swallow.”

It was only a day or two after that perilous “cruise,” that Dab Kinzer met his old playmate, Jenny Walters, just in the edge of the village.