| PAGE | ||
| “Don’t Think for a Moment of Getting any other Canoe” | [Frontispiece] | |
| “She’s Half Full of Water” | [30] | |
| A Stampede in Camp | [38] | |
| Not so Easy as it Looks | [50] | |
| “He Caught Hold of the Root of a Tree and kept his Canoe Stationary” | [70] | |
| Running the Rapid | [78] | |
| Getting Breakfast under Difficulties | [94] | |
| Hunting for a Wild-cat in Chambly Castle | [110] | |
| Sailing Down the Richelieu River | [116] | |
| “They Found a Bear Feasting upon the Remains of their Breakfast” | [138] | |
| Around the Camp-fire | [146] | |
| “How in the World did you Get up there?” | [160] |
THE CRUISE
OF
THE CANOE CLUB.
Chapter I.
IT is a very easy thing for four boys to make up their minds to get four canoes and to go on a canoe cruise, but it is not always so easy to carry out such a project—as Charley Smith, Tom Schuyler, Harry Wilson, and Joe Sharpe discovered.
Canoes cost money; and though some canoes cost more than others, it is impossible to buy a new wooden canoe of an approved model for less than seventy-five dollars. Four canoes, at seventy-five dollars each, would cost altogether three hundred dollars. As the entire amount of pocket-money in the possession of the boys was only seven dollars and thirteen cents, it was clear that they were not precisely in a position to buy canoes.
There was Harry’s uncle, who had already furnished his nephew and his young comrades first with a row-boat, and then with a sail-boat. Even a benevolent uncle deserves some mercy, and the boys agreed that it would never do to ask Uncle John to spend three hundred dollars in canoes for them. “The most we can ask of him,” said Charley Smith, “is to let us sell the Ghost and use the money to help pay for canoes.”
Now, the Ghost, in which the boys had made a cruise along the south shore of Long Island, was a very nice sail-boat, but it was improbable that any one would be found who would be willing to give more than two hundred dollars for her. There would still be a hundred dollars wanting, and the prospect of finding that sum seemed very small.