And all the waking glee of tide, dunes, and woods was personified in the boy bugler's face. The sight of him as he stood there, face to the tents where his comrades scrambled up from cot or ground, his brown eyes snapping and flashing under the scout's broad hat, with the delight of having found an absorbing interest which stimulated and turned to good account every budding activity within him--that sight would have made the veriest old Seek-sorrow among men take heart and feel that a new era of chivalry was in flower among the Scouts of the U.S.A. And the old religious reverence, that fortifying kernel of knighthood, was not neglected by this boy scout patrol. Bareheaded, and in line with their scoutmasters presently, while their eyes gazed off over the sparkling dunes and crystal tide-stretches, they repeated in unison the Lord's Prayer, offering morning homage to the Power, dimly discerned, of whom and through whom and to whom are all things. Of his, the Father's, presence chamber, gladness and beauty stand at the threshold! "_Now_, for our early swim! The tide's just right. Come along, Harold; I'm going to give _you_ your first swimming-lesson; and I expect you'll be a star pupil!" cried Nixon, the patrol leader, when the brief adoration was over. "What! you don't want to learn to swim? Nonsense! You _are_ going into that dandy water. Oh! that's not a scout's mouth, Harold." And the corners of Harold's mouth, which had drooped with fear of this new experience, curled up in a yielding grin. Once he was in the invigorating salt water, feeling the boisterous tidal ripples, fresh and not too cold, rise about his body, the timid lad underwent another lightning change, just as at the moment of his tying the bowline knot, the spirit of his fisherman father became uppermost in him, and he learned to swim almost as easily and naturally as a pup-seal. The improvement in his condition was such that his brother Owls had won his promise to enter school when it should reopen after this jolly camping period was over. "And if any boy picks on you or teases you, Harold, mind you're to let us know at once, because we're your brother scouts--and he won't try it a second time!" So they admonished him. Thus Harold, under the Owls' sheltering wing, was gradually losing his inherited and imbibed dread of a crowd, of any gathering of his own kind. Although this bugbear fear returned upon him a little when, later on that morning, the Fox Patrol, with Godey Peck as its leader, was landed upon the Sugarloaf Dunes from Captain Andy's motor-launch, and still later in the day the Seals rowed across in two large rowboats from certain farms or fishermen's houses upon the opposite side of the river, to join the other two patrols. So that the boy scout troop was complete, and Harold found himself one of twenty-four boisterous, though good-natured, boys upon this strange white beach.