For this was Aunt Bessie’s plan. She had written Mrs. Horton that she and a friend, a teacher, had taken a cottage at the seashore for the month of August, and they wanted Sunny Boy and his mother to come and spend that month with them. The cottage was near enough to the city for Mr. Horton to go down every night and stay with them.
“And two weeks from to-day,” Mrs. Horton had told Sunny Boy as he brushed his hair that morning, “you will be going down to the beach with a tin pail and shovel, I expect, to play in the sand.”
Grandpa, carrying two boxes of lunch and a little camp chair that folded up—because Grandma had aches in her joints if she tried to sit on the ground—smiled down at his grandson.
“Oh, well, we shall just have to have as much fun as we can while you’re here,” he said firmly. “Let’s have a perfectly fine picnic with all the sandwiches we can eat to-day.”
“Yes,” agreed Sunny enthusiastically. “Let’s.”
“Sunny, what have you found there?” asked Grandpa after a while.
“It’s a bird,” said Sunny pitifully. “A poor, little dead bird, Grandpa. See?”
He brought back the little feathered body he had found at the foot of a tall oak tree, and showed them.
“It’s a baby robin,” said Grandma, touching the little thing gently. “It must have fallen out of the nest. Don’t grieve, lambie, nothing can hurt the little bird now.”
“I want to bury it,” insisted Sunny, tears running down his face. “I don’t want to leave it on the ground, Grandma.”