“Isn’t that strange!  Did you say they were good men?”

“Some of ’em.  Honest as the day is long about everything else.  But they weren’t all so.  There was old Peter, and he lives on the Island yet.  There’s his cabin now.  You can just see it in the edge of that great sand-hill.”

“What a queer thing it is!”

“Sometimes the storms drift the sand all over it, and old Peter has to dig it out again.  He’s snowed under two or three times every winter.”

They were now coasting along the island, at no great distance, and, although it was not nearly noon, Dab heard Joe Hart say to his brother: 

“Never was so hungry in all my life.  Glad they did lay in a good stock of provisions.”

“So am I,” returned Fuz.  “Isn’t there any such thing as our getting into the cabin!”

No, there was not, so long as Mrs. Kinzer was the “stewardess” of that expedition, and Joe and Fuz were compelled to wait her motions.

(To be continued.)

THE FOX AND THE TURKEYS; OR, CHARLEY AND THE OLD FOLKS.

By Susan Coolidge.

[Illustration:  [A cunning fox perceived some turkeys roosting securely on the bough of a high tree.  Unable to climb, he resolved to get at them in another way.  Night after night he stationed himself beneath the tree, and there played off all sorts of curious tricks.  He jumped, he capered, he turned somersaults, he walked on his hind legs, he pretended to be dead, he raised and expanded his tail until, in the moonlight, it looked like a flame of fire,—­in short, he performed every antic conceivable.  The turkeys, who, to sleep in safety, had only to turn their backs and forget the fox, were so agitated and excited by his pranks that for whole nights they never closed their eyes; the consequence was that they lost strength, and one by one dropped from the bough and into the jaws of Renard, who soon made an end of them.

Moral.—­It is unwise to concern one’s self with the tricks and antics of mischievous persons.—­La Fontaine’s Fables.]]

It was midsummer at the old Brush Farm.  When I say “midsummer,” how many pretty things it means,—­woods at their freshest and greenest, meadows sweet with newly cut hay, cinnamon-roses in the hedges and water-lilies in the ponds, bees buzzing in and out of the clove-pinks and larkspurs which edge the beds of cabbages and carrots in the kitchen-garden, a humming-bird 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.