“No wonder we couldn’t find ’em!” cried Sunny Boy, dancing with excitement. “I knew I saw it fall in a tree! Won’t Daddy be glad!”
“We’re all glad,” declared Mother, kissing him warmly. “Isn’t it just wonderful to think that the same little boy who lost the bonds should also find them?”
“It’s been a lucky picnic, surely,” said Grandpa. “After a hard rain those bonds wouldn’t have been worth much to any one.”
“Well, they won’t be worth much now if we all stand here and get soaked,” announced Grandma practically.
At that they all took hold of hands and ran across the meadow, over the bridge of stones, and up to the porch. And the moment they were safely under shelter, how the rain did pour down! Just as if, Sunny said, it had been waiting for them to get home before it showed what it really could do.
“Mother,” asked Sunny Boy that night, as he sat on the foot-board of the bed in his blue pajamas and watched her brush her hair. They were all tired after the excitement of the picnic and the finding of the bonds, and every one was going to bed at Sunny’s bed time, even Grandpa. “Mother, will I take my sand-box to the seashore?”
“Oh, no, precious,” she assured him. “Why, you’ll have a whole beach of sand to play in. And the bathing suit I bought for you to wear here and which you haven’t had on because the brook water is so cold! Perhaps Daddy will teach you to swim.”
“Yes,” agreed Sunny Boy absently. And he tumbled back on the pillows, thinking about the seashore and the ocean which he had never seen.
It was not very long after the picnic that Mother and Sunny Boy left Brookside and went to visit Aunt Bessie in her white cottage that faced the ocean. And if you want to hear about the good times Sunny Boy had there and what he thought the waves were saying to him when he got up in the night to listen, you’ll have to read “Sunny Boy at the Seashore.”
THE END