LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[At the finish]Frontispiece
PAGE
[“‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Break your strap?’”]7
[“‘Where do I live, do you suppose?’ he asked”]41
[The imaginary letter]47
[A meeting of the Ferry Hill School Improvement Society]71
[“‘Mama, you mustn’t see!’ she cried. ‘It’s a secret!’”]77
[“Harry caught her sweater by the end of one sleeve and tossed it toward him”]111
[“There was a full attendance of the Improvement Society”]123
[“‘I’m Sherlock Holmes’”]149
[“They scuttled hurriedly to the side of the road and subsided in the bushes”]167
[“‘That’s the Insane Asylum’”]193
[“‘Ah, there!’”]209
[The launching]231
[“A half-mile away was the finish line”]271
[Work out of doors]291
[“‘It’s gone,’ wailed Harry”]305
[“‘And something else, too!’”]381

TOM, DICK, AND HARRIET

[CHAPTER I]
A MEETING ON THE ICE

There had been almost a week of zero weather and the Hudson River in the neighborhood of Coleville and Ferry Hill was frozen hard and fast from shore to shore. They were cutting ice below Coleville, and Dick Somes had watched them for some time before crossing the river in the teeth of a bitter east wind and reaching the shelter of the opposite shore. There, with the trees protecting him from the icy blast, he turned up-stream once more and skated more leisurely along the margin.

It was the middle of an afternoon in early January, to be exact, the third day of the new year; and overhead sunlight and clouds held alternate sway. But the sun, already nearing the summit of the distant hills, held little warmth even when it managed to escape for a moment from the flying banks of cloud, and Dick, accustomed though he was to the intense cold of the western mountains and prairies, was glad to escape for a while from that biting wind which apparently entertained not the slightest respect for his clothing and which numbed him through and through.