Sunny Boy, stretched full length in his express wagon, kicked his heels excitedly.
“We ate on the train,” he said eagerly. “But—what you think?—we’re going to Nestle Cove in Daddy’s new automobile!”
“I saw it out in front yesterday,” Nelson volunteered. “It’s a nice big one. I’ll bet I could most run one!”
“P’haps,” admitted Sunny Boy doubtfully. “Anyway, you have to be grown-up before they let you—Daddy said so. Mother’s going, an’ Harriet, an’ Aunt Bessie and Miss Mart’son.” Sunny Boy meant Miss Martinson, a school teacher and Aunt Bessie’s best friend, but his tongue had a trick of skipping letters when he pronounced long words. “And Aunt Bessie has a house with a big porch, and she says I can sleep in a hammock like a sailor if I want to. An’ I’m going to make a fish pond in the sand.”
“Look out you don’t get scared by a crab,” Nelson advised him. “Ruth did. She screamed and screamed. I went fishing with my daddy on a great long pier, but we didn’t catch anything.”
“I saved all the pebbles,” Ruth began hopefully.
“I went fishing in the brook.” Sunny Boy was forgetting that it isn’t polite to interrupt another.
“I got so sunburned it all peeled off, and then—” Nelson was eager to tell his experiences, too.
“My goodness, children, how you do chatter!” Mrs. Baker opened the gate in the fence and beckoned smilingly to her youngsters. “Hello, Sunny dear. Glad to be home again? Ruth, Mother needs you now to try on the new frock, and, Nelson, you’ll have to go to the store for me. Come right away, dears—you’ll see Sunny again before he goes away.”
Nelson gathered up his string obediently and trotted through the gate. Ruth slipped her hand into her mother’s and followed him. Left alone, Sunny Boy wiggled to a more comfortable position in his wagon and gave himself up to pleasant thoughts of the coming trip.