Now he and his mother had left Brookside and dear Grandpa and Grandma Horton, and with Daddy Horton had come back to their city home to get ready for a visit to the seashore. Aunt Bessie, who was Mrs. Horton’s sister, and her friend Miss Martinson had rented a bungalow at Nestle Cove, and they wanted Sunny Boy and his mother to come and stay with them.
The sun was blazing down into the back yard, and it really was very hot. Sunny Boy took his wagon down the laundry steps into the house, stopping for a moment to get a drink of water at the sink, on through the front basement hall and up the steps out into the street.
“Well, well, you back?” The postman, on the steps of the Bakers’ house, smiled at him. “Have a nice time?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sunny Boy, with satisfaction. “An’ day after to-morrow Daddy’s going to take us in the auto to Nestle Cove.”
“Well, you are having a fine summer,” replied the postman heartily. “Don’t get so tanned that, when you come back, I might take you for a little chocolate boy, will you?”
“Oh, no,” Sunny assured him. “I don’t mean to.”
Whistling pleasantly, the postman went on up the street, and Sunny Boy, pushing his wagon idly back and forth by the tongue, thought that when he grew up he would be a postman too.
“But I don’t know whether I’d like to be a postman in the city where I’d see a lot of people and know such a lot of children, or be one in the country, like the postman that comes to Brookside farm, and ride around all day in a buggy. That would be fun. I could know children in the country, too. There was an awful lot of Hatch children, seven of them.”
Sunny Boy was thinking of the children of the tenant who lived on Grandpa’s farm, and with whom he played while he was visiting at Brookside.
“’Lo!” called the girl across the street, sweeping the pavement.