"Ever so many, and there used to be more of them. It was a bad place to run ashore, in those days. Almost as bad as Jersey." "Why?" "Because of the wreckers. The shore's bad enough, and the bar's a mean place to escape on, but the wreckers used to make it worse." And Dab launched out into a slightly exaggerated description of the terrors of the Long Island coast in old times and new, and of the character of the men who were formerly the first to find out if anything or anybody had gone ashore. "What a prize that French steamer would have been!" said Annie, "the one you took Frank Harley from." "No, she wouldn't. Why, she wasn't wrecked at all. She only stuck her nose in the sand and lay still till the tugs pulled her off. That isn't a wreck. A wreck is where the ship is knocked to pieces and people are drowned, and all that sort of thing. Then the wreckers have a notion that everything that comes ashore belongs to them. Why, I've heard even some of our old fishermen--best kind of men, too--talk of how government has robbed 'em of their rights." "By the new system?" "By having wrecks prevented, and saving the property for the owners." "Isn't that strange! Did you say they were good men?" "Some of 'em. Honest as the day is long about everything else. But they weren't all so. There was old Peter, and he lives on the Island yet. There's his cabin now. You can just see it in the edge of that great sand-hill." "What a queer thing it is!" "Sometimes the storms drift the sand all over it, and old Peter has to dig it out again. He's snowed under two or three times every winter." They were now coasting along the island, at no great distance, and, although it was not nearly noon, Dab heard Joe Hart say to his brother: "Never was so hungry in all my life. Glad they did lay in a good stock of provisions." "So am I," returned Fuz. "Isn't there any such thing as our getting into the cabin!" No, there was not, so long as Mrs. Kinzer was the "stewardess" of that expedition, and Joe and Fuz were compelled to wait her motions. (_To be continued._) THE FOX AND THE TURKEYS; OR, CHARLEY AND THE OLD FOLKS. By Susan Coolidge. [Illustration: [A cunning fox perceived some turkeys roosting securely on the bough of a high tree. Unable to climb, he resolved to get at them in another way. Night after night he stationed himself beneath the tree, and there played off all sorts of curious tricks. He jumped, he capered, he turned somersaults, he walked on his hind legs, he pretended to be dead, he raised and expanded his tail until, in the moonlight, it looked like a flame of fire,--in short, he performed every antic conceivable. The turkeys, who, to sleep in safety, had only to turn their backs and forget the fox, were so agitated and excited by his pranks that for whole nights they never closed their eyes; the consequence was that they lost strength, and one by one dropped from the bough and into the jaws of Renard, who soon made an end of them.