BEN, DAN, AND JACK.
THEY lived in a long, low, rambling house; it might have been built a century ago, so queer and old-fashioned was it. But little cared the boys; they had good times. Mr. and Mrs. Prentice believed in boys; and they believed in boys having good times, always provided the good did not mean bad. For one thing, the Prentice boys were allowed to go barefooted. Now every boy knows that it is fun to go barefoot. They wore palm leaf hats in summer, which were not too good to play "pitch and toss" with. They were allowed to despoil the squash vines for leaf stalks to make "squawk pipes," and nice golden pumpkins from the field were not too precious in the eyes of Farmer Prentice to be used in making jack-o'-lanterns; they were allowed to go a-fishing; to go a-berrying, and to make up nutting parties, and, best fun of all, when all the neighborhood turned out to hunt the coons which were destroying the corn crop, the boys were allowed to join in the hunt.
How good the green corn roasted by that midnight fire down in the old pasture lot, just over the fence from the corn lot, tasted. And that was the time they learned the secret of roasting eggs and potatoes in the hot ashes. How carefully they rolled the eggs in many layers of brown paper, and then wetting them thoroughly laid them in the bed made ready, and covering with the heated ashes they listened for the cracking of the shells which would tell that the eggs were done. But these boys did not spend all their time in just having "good times." Now and then as they gathered around the kitchen fire in winter or were grouped in the yard, they would forget their popping corn or their jack-o'-lantern and fall to talking over the last book they had read.
There was no lack of books in the Prentice home. For if Mr. and Mrs. Prentice believed in boys, they also believed in books for boys.
"Any gunpowder under that?" asked Dan one morning, coming around the corner of the house and seeing a great pile of kindling wood which Jack was splitting.
"Not a keg!" was the reply.
"I thought you must be plotting some mischief or you would never have stuck to the work long enough to split such a pile as that," continued Dan.
"There is a plot, that's a fact," returned Jack; "but it is not a Gunpowder Plot. I am going to ask father to let me go with Johnson when he goes after those cattle, and we shall be gone three days, so I thought it would advance my cause a little if the kindlings were all ready beforehand."