Odd, was it not, but Annie Foster and Jenny Walters were half a mile apart when they both said that very thing, just before the clock in the village church hammered out the news that it was ten and bed-time. They were not speaking of the tramp. It was long after that, however, before the lights were out in all the rooms of the Morris mansion. CHAPTER XVII. Sleep? One of the most excellent things in all the world, and very few people get too much of it nowadays. As for Dabney Kinzer, he had done his sleeping as regularly and faithfully as even his eating, up to that very night after Ham Morris came home to find the big barn afire. There had been a few, a very few exceptions. There were the nights when he was expecting to go duck-shooting before daylight, and waked up at midnight with a strong conviction that he was already too late about starting. There were perhaps a dozen or so of "eeling" expeditions which had kept him out late enough for a full basket and a proper scolding. There, too, was the night when he had stood so steadily by the tiller of the "Swallow," while she danced through the dark across the rough waves of the Atlantic. But on the whole, Dab Kinzer had been a good sleeper all his life till then. Once in bed, and there had been an end of all wakefulness. On that particular night, for the first time, sleep refused to come, late as was the hour when the family circle broke up. It could not have been the excitement of Ham's and Miranda's return. He'd have gotten over that by this time. No more could it have been the fire, though the smell of the smoldering hay came in pretty strongly, at times, through the wide-open windows. If any one patch of that great roomy bed was better made up for sleeping than the rest of it, Dab would surely have found the spot, for he tumbled and rolled all over it in his restlessness. Some fields on a farm will "grow" better wheat than others, but no part of the bed seemed to grow any sleep. At last Dab got wearily up and took a chair by the window. The night was dark, but the stars were shining, and every now and then the wind would make a shovel of itself and toss up the hot ashes the fire had left, sending a dull red glare around on the house and barns for a moment, and flooding all the neighborhood with a stronger smell of burnt hay. "If you're going to burn hay," soliloquized Dab, "it wont do to take a barn for a stove. Not that kind of a barn. But what did Ham Morris mean by saying I was to go to boarding-school? That's what I'd like to know." The secret was out. He had kept remarkably still, for him, all the evening, and had not asked a question; but if his brains were ever to work over his books as they had over Ham's remark, his future chances for sound sleep were all gone. It had come upon him so suddenly, the very thing he had been wishing for during all those walks and talks and lessons of all sorts with Ford Foster and Frank Harley ever since the cruise of the "Swallow."