“Do you like to study?” Harry asked.
“Pretty well; everything but languages. Which way do we go? Up this path?”
“Yes. Oh, I forgot. That’s the boat-house there. We have a crew and we race Hammond every spring. Last year we were beaten.”
“I never saw a boat race,” said Dick. “It must be good sport.”
“It’s perfectly great,” said Harry, “and awfully exciting! This is the Grove and the buildings are up the hill, only you can’t see them yet. I’ll go ahead and show you the way.”
The path wound through a thick growth of trees, maples and oaks and others, climbing steadily upward. Presently the trees thinned and ceased and Dick followed his guide through a gap in a breast-high hedge which, as Harry informed him, marked “inner bounds.” I have no intention of recording the fund of information which Harry showered upon Dick’s defenseless head. Needless to say that she colored her remarks with the rose-tint of enthusiasm and drew a most alluring picture of life at Ferry Hill. She rattled on breathlessly and continuously after she had once become warmed up to her task and Dick’s brain began to reel under the torrent of information.
He was shown Burgess Hall, with the dormitories and the dining-room, School Hall, with its twilighted class rooms, the Cottage, where Harry lived—Harry pointed out her room and described the furnishings minutely, even to the pink paper on the walls—and the Gymnasium, which was locked, and consequently remained a mystery for the present. Back of the gym a gate in the hedge gave access to the Athletic Field, with its snow-filled stands and gibbet-like goal-posts rising forlornly out of the white waste. Harry said there was a running track there, but Dick had to take her word for it. Then they retraced their steps and Harry pointed out, at a distance, the stables and barns and the orchard beyond.
“I’ll show you my menagerie some time,” she said. “It lives in the barn. I’ve got a parrot, three lovely Angora kittens, a squirrel, four guinea-pigs, six rabbits, lots and lots of white mice, heaps of pigeons, and a dog.”
“Phew!” said Dick. “Is that all?”
“The dog’s name is Snip,” Harry continued. “He’s a fox terrier. Last year I had two black rabbits and I called them Pete and Repeat, and then there was a third and I had to call it Threepete. Isn’t that silly?”