Sunny Boy was so short that he walked under the turnstile instead of through it, and the ticket man laughed when he saw him do it.
"Look out one of the sea gulls doesn't take you for a bite of breakfast," he called jokingly after him.
"Huh," Sunny Boy said resentfully to Mother, "I'm not so little. I know lots of children littler than I am. Wonder what he'd say if he saw Lottie Saunders going through his gate."
Lottie Saunders was a little friend of Sunny Boy's at home. She was not quite three years old.
There was a crowd of people waiting to get on the ferryboat and for a few minutes the Hortons had to stand at the closed door while the people on the boat walked off. There were a great many automobiles and horses and wagons and trucks coming off, too, and the drivers did a deal of shouting.
"Everybody's in a hurry," observed Sunny Boy, when the door was at last slid back and the crowd started to jostle its way on board.
Crowds are always in a hurry, if you have noticed it. They run and push and scramble to get somewhere, and then, when they are there, they sit down and rest or stand about contentedly, quite as though they did not know what hurrying meant.
"What do they do with the ropes?" asked Sunny Boy, as they went down the inclined plank and stepped on the ferryboat deck.
"They're what hold the boat in the slip," explained Mr. Horton. "If we stay on this back deck till the boat moves, you'll see the men take out those great hooks and wind the ropes on those wheels. Do you want to see them do it?"
Sunny Boy did, of course, and he waited till the gates were closed and the ropes loosened. Then two men, one on either side of the wharf, or slip, as they call the docks built for this kind of boat, gave a large spiked wheel one long, powerful turn, and it spun round rapidly, coiling up the ropes.