The next morning--it being a bright and sunny Saturday toward the last of January--Dick, Trevor, Carl, and Stewart boarded the train and traveled to Euston Point, but a few miles distant, where they called on the man whose advertisement Carl had read in a local paper, and by him were conducted to a loft by the river, where a dilapidated-looking triangle of timbers and bolts--which its owner declared loudly was the fastest cat-rigged yacht on the Hudson--was shown to them. The bargain was soon closed, Carl conducting the negotiations and talking learnedly of runner planks, center timbers, and stays. The boat was to be supplied with a new rudder-post, a new sail and rigging, the runners were to be reground, and the whole was to be delivered at the boat landing at Hillton Academy four days from that date for the munificent sum of seventeen dollars and seventy-five cents. Carl was elated. “We’ve saved two dollars and a quarter,” he declared. “I don’t see how,” objected Dick. “You told us last week that we could get the thing for fifteen dollars.” “I know I did; that’s what I thought. But you heard him ask twenty at first, didn’t you? Well, and I jewed him down to seventeen seventy-five. Isn’t that two and a quarter saved?” Dick had to acknowledge that it was, and Carl insisted on celebrating his successful financiering by treating to very nasty hot soda at the town’s only drug store. And so to Carl’s business acumen may be traced the series of events that led shortly to Trevor’s disgrace. Their way to the station took them past the open door of a livery stable. When they were abreast of it something round and white shot out, rolled over and over down the little incline, and brought up at Trevor’s feet. It proved to be a young puppy, which, when it stopped rolling, found its four unsteady feet, barked joyously, and tried to gnaw the buttons from Trevor’s trouser cuffs. But he was instantly seized upon and elevated in Trevor’s arms for the inspection of the others. “Isn’t he a little beauty?” cried Trevor. “Yes; what is he, a fox terrier?” asked Stewart, allowing the squirming and delighted puppy to chew his gloved fingers to its heart’s content. “Fox terrier!” replied Trevor scathingly. “Of course not; it’s a bull. Look at that nose!” “I am looking at it,” answered Dick. “Nice and ugly, isn’t it? What makes it so pink?” “That’s the way it ought to be,” answered Trevor with fine disdain for his friend’s ignorance. “I wonder who it belongs to?”