over the yard which in itself was a veritable treasure-house.  Here were rusty chains and wooden figure-heads of broken-nosed, blind maidens and tailless dolphins.  Here were twisted iron rods, fish-baskets, broken lobster-pots, rotting seines and tangled, useless nets—­some used as coverings for coops of restless chickens—­old worn-out rope, tangled rigging—­everything that a fisherman who had spent his life on Barnegat beach could pull from the surf or find stranded on the sand.

Besides all these priceless treasures, there was an old boat lying afloat in a small lagoon back of the house, one of those seepage pools common to the coast—­a boat which Fogarty had patched with a bit of sail-cloth, and for which he had made two pairs of oars, one for each of the “crew,” as he called the lads, and which Archie learned to handle with such dexterity that the old fisherman declared he would make a first-class boatman when he grew up, and would “shame the whole bunch of ’em.”

But these two valiant buccaneers were not to remain in undisturbed possession of the Bandit’s Home with its bewildering fittings and enchanting possibilities —­not for long.  The secret of the uses to which the stranded craft bad been put, and the attendant fun which Commodore Tod and his dauntless henchman, Archibald Cobden, Esquire, were daily getting out of its battered timbers, had already become public property.  The youth of Barnegat—­ the very young youth, ranging from nine to twelve, and all boys—­received the news at first with hilarious joy.  This feeling soon gave way to unsuppressed indignation, followed by an active bitterness, when they realized in solemn conclave—­the meeting was held in an open lot on Saturday morning—­that the capture of the craft had been accomplished, not by dwellers under Barnegat Light, to whom every piece of sea-drift from a tomato-can to a full-rigged ship rightfully belonged, but by a couple of aliens, one of whom wore knee-pants and a white collar,—­a distinction in dress highly obnoxious to these lords of the soil.

All these denizens of Barnegat had at one time or another climbed up the sloop’s chains and peered down the hatchway to the sand covering the keelson, and most of them had used it as a shelter behind which, in swimming-time, they had put on or peeled off such mutilated rags as covered their nakedness, but no one of them had yet conceived the idea of turning it into a Bandit’s Home.  That touch of the ideal, that gilding of the commonplace, had been reserved for the brain of the curly-haired boy who, with dancing eyes, his sturdy little legs resting on Tod’s shoulder, had peered over the battered rail, and who, with a burst of enthusiasm, had shouted:  “Oh, cracky! isn’t it nice, Tod!  It’s got a place we can fix up for a robbers’ den; and we’ll be bandits and have a flag.  Oh, come up here!  You never saw anything so fine,” etc., etc.