"His face looked like a kitten's there in the water," said d.i.c.k, "and he mewed pitifully. I've heard of him. Sort of a slim thing. Well, may sound sort of heartless, but I guess some folks would say he is hardly worth the saving. Oh, you're off, are you?"

"Yes," said one of the two fishermen who were now pushing their boat off from sh.o.r.e. "We must get to town with our fish as soon as we can."

"Well, friends, I am much obliged to you," said d.i.c.k Pray.

"So am I! so am I!" said several others.

"Count me in too," exclaimed Dave Fletcher. "Might not have been here without you.--Give 'em three cheers, boys!"

Amid the huzzahs echoing over the waters, the fishermen, smiling and bowing, rowed off.

"Many thanks, boys, if you will help me to turn Bart's boat over and get the water out. I must row it up to the rock where the rest of my clothes are, and then we might all go along together. We can pick up the fellows on the schooner."

The remnant of Captain d.i.c.k's crew on board the schooner gladly abandoned it when Gran'sir Trafton's boat came along, and all journeyed in company up the river.

And where was Little Mew? He went home only to be scolded by gran'sir because he had not brought the doctor, and because he had somehow got into the water somewhere. Granny was not at home, and Little Mew dared not tell the whole story. He was sent upstairs to change his clothes and stay there till granny got home.

"Gran'sir don't know I haven't got another shift," whined Little Mew.

"Got to get these wet things off, anyhow."

He removed them and then crept into bed. It was dark when granny returned.

From the window at the head of his bed Bartie watched the sun go down, and then he saw the white stars come into the sky.

About that time the evening breeze began to breathe heavily; and was that the reason why the stars, blossom-like, opened their fair, delicate petals, even as they say the wind-flowers of spring open when the wind begins to blow?

"They don't seem to amount to much--just like me," thought Bartie; and having thus come into harmony with the world's opinion of himself, he closed his eyes, like an anemone shutting its petals, and went to sleep.

Don't stars amount to much? They would be missed if, some night, people looking up should learn that they had gone for ever.

And granny coming home, having learned elsewhere the full story of Little Mew's exposure to an awful peril, went upstairs, and, candle in hand, looked down on the motherless child in bed fast asleep.

"Poor little boy!" she murmured. "I should miss him if he was gone.

Yes, I should terribly."

She wiped her eyes, and then tucked up Bartie for the night.

II.

_CAUGHT ON THE BAR._

Dave Fletcher and d.i.c.k Pray were boys who had grown up in the same town, but from the same soil had come two very different productions. They were unlike in their personal appearance. d.i.c.k Pray would come down the street throwing his head to right and left, scattering sharp, eager glances from his restless black eyes, and swinging his hands.

"Somebody is coming," people would be very likely to say.

Dave Fletcher had a quiet, un.o.btrusive, straight-forward way of walking.

d.i.c.k was quite a handsome youth; but the person that Dave Fletcher saw in the gla.s.s was ordinary in feature, with pleasant, honest eyes of blue, and hair--was it brown or black?

Dave sometimes wished it were browner or blacker, and not "a go-between," as he had told his mother.

Dave and d.i.c.k were not as yet trying to make their own way; but they were between fifteen and sixteen, and knew that they must soon be stirring for themselves.

They had already begun to intimate how they would stir in after life.

Dave had a quiet, resolute way. There was no pretence or bl.u.s.ter in his methods. In a modest but manly fashion he went ahead and did the thing while d.i.c.k was talking about it, and perhaps magnifying its difficulty, that inferentially his courage and pluck in attempting it might be magnified. d.i.c.k's way of strutting down-street ill.u.s.trated his methods and manners. There was a great deal of bl.u.s.ter in him. n.o.body was more daring than he in his purposes, but for the quiet doing of the thing that d.i.c.k dared, Dave was the boy. Somehow d.i.c.k had received the idea that the world is to be carried by a display of strength rather than its actual use; that men must be impressed by brag and noise. Thus overpowered by a sensational manifestation they would be plastic to your hands, whatever you might wish to mould them into. d.i.c.k did not hesitate to attack any fort, scale any mountain, or cross any sea--with his tongue. When it came to the using of some other kind of motive power--legs for instance--he might be readily outstripped by another.

Among the boys at Shipton he had made quite a stir at first. His bl.u.s.ter and brag made a sensation, until the boys began to find out that it was often wind and not substance in d.i.c.k's bragging; and they were now estimating him at his true value. Dave Fletcher was little known to any of them save small Bartholomew Trafton; but Dave's modest, efficient style of action they had seen in the saving of Little Mew, and they were destined to witness it in another impending catastrophe.

"Uncle Ferguson, who owns that old schooner off in the river?" asked Dave one day, as he was eating his way through a generous pile of Aunt Nancy's fritters. It was the craft to which had been tied the _Great Emperor_.

"Why, David?"

"Because some of us boys want to go there and stay a night or two. We take our provisions with us, and each one a couple of blankets, and so on, and we can be as comfortable on the schooner as can be. Would you and Aunt Nancy mind if we went?"

"Mind if you went? No; I don't know as I do.--What do you say, Nancy?"

Uncle Ferguson was a middle-aged man, with ruddy complexion and two blue eyes that almost shut and then twinkled like stars when he looked at you.

Aunt Nancy was a plain, sober woman, with sharp, thin features, and bleached eyes of blue.

"Don't know as I mind," declared Aunt Nancy. "If you don't git into the water and drown, you know."

"Oh, that's all right," said the nephew.

"Only you must see the owner of the schooner," advised the uncle.

"The owner?"

"Yes; Squire Sylvester. He is very particular about anything he owns."

"Oh, I didn't know the thing had an owner," said Dave, laughing. "It seems to lie there in the stream doing nothing. The boys didn't say anything about an owner."

"Squire Sylvester is very particular," a.s.serted Uncle Ferguson. "He got his property hard, and looks after it."

"Yes, he is very pertickerler," added Aunt Nancy.

"Well, we will see him by all means. We boys--"

"Didn't think; that is it, David. Now, when I was a boy we always asked about things," said Uncle Ferguson.

"Well, husband, boys is boys, in them days and these days. I remember your mother used to say her five boys used to cut up and--"

"Well," replied Uncle Ferguson, rising from the table, "this won't feed the cows; and I must be a-goin'. I would see Sylvester, David."

"All right, uncle."