He was a tall, broad-shouldered, fine-looking young man of twenty-three or twenty-four, with a frank, open countenance and a magnetism of voice and smile and manner which made every one his friend with whom he came in contact. City born and proud of being a Bostonian, he was still very fond of the country, and especially of Oak City, where he was just as polite and kind to the poorest fisherman on the beach as to the Governor’s son when he was there. Everybody knew him, and everybody liked him, especially Miss Hansford, with whom he was a great favorite. As a rule she didn’t think much of boys, and sometimes wondered why the Lord ever made them, or having made them, why He did not keep them shut up until they were men before turning them loose upon the community. Naturally boys didn’t like her, and many were the pranks played upon her by the mischief-loving lads, with Jack Percy at their head as ringleader. Him Miss Hansford detested as much as she liked Paul Ralston. She had known the latter since he wore wide collars and knickerbockers and stole her one watermelon from her bit of garden at the rear of her house. This garden was her pride, and she nursed her few flowers and vegetables and fruits with the utmost care, contriving various snares and traps as pitfalls for the marauding boys, who thought her garden and its contents lawful prey, and plundered it accordingly. Only one melon had rewarded her care, and this she watched vigilantly as it ripened in the August sun. Jack Percy was late in coming that summer, and to his absence she felt she owed the preservation of her cherished melon. Jack came at last on the afternoon boat, a guest of the Ralstons, whose acquaintance she had not then made. The next morning her melon was gone, and in the soft, sandy soil around the bed were the marks of two pairs of feet, and Miss Hansford had no hesitancy in fixing upon Jack Percy as one of the culprits. She knew of his arrival, and that he was visiting the Ralstons. Unquestionably Paul was the other delinquent. “Birds of a feather flock together, and I’ve no doubt one is as bad as t’other. I wish I had ’em by the nape of the neck,” she was thinking, when a shadow fell upon the floor, and, turning from her breakfast table, which she was clearing, she saw a boy standing in the doorway with an immense watermelon in his arms and a frightened look in his blue eyes, which, nevertheless, confronted her steadily, as he said: “I am Paul Ralston, from Boston, and I live in the Ralston House.” “Yes, I know you are Paul Ralston, and that you live in the Ralston House, but I don’t know as that makes you any better than if you lived in a hovel,” was Miss Hansford’s ungracious reply, at which the boy colored a little, and then went on: “I don’t s’pose it does. I didn’t tell you where I lived to make you think better of me. I only wanted you to know who I was, for I stole your watermelon last night after you were asleep.”