“Come on over to the post-office with me,” he said. “You’re in no hurry for supper. It’s my turn to go for the mail, and we are expecting a letter from father up in Benton.” So the two boys retraced their steps, and the three friends went along up the road together. “We haven’t a very extensive correspondence to look after, eh, Jack?” remarked Henry Burns; “but we’ll go along for company’s sake. My aunt never writes to me, and I think I never received but two letters in my life. They were from old Mrs. Newcome.” “I never got any,” declared Harvey. “My dad says to me at the beginning of the summer, ‘Where are you going?’ and I say, ‘Oh, down in the bay,’ or wherever it is I am going. Then he says, ‘Well, take care of yourself,’ and forgets all about me, except he sends money down to me regularly—and more when I ask him.” The boy’s remark was, in fact, an unconscious criticism of the elder Harvey, and accounted, perhaps, for some of Harvey’s past adventures which were not altogether commendable. Harvey’s father was of the rough and ready sort. He had made money in the Western gold-fields, where he had started out as a miner and prospector. Now he was enjoying it in generous fashion, and denied his family nothing. He had a theory that a boy that had the “right stuff in him,” as he put it, would make his way without any particular care taken of him; and he was content to allow his son, Jack, to do whatever he pleased. A convenient arrangement, by the way, which also left Mr. Harvey free to do whatever he pleased, without the worry of family affairs. The boys walked through the fields, up a gentle incline of the land, which led to the general higher level of the island, overlooking the bay and the islands in the distance. They gazed back presently upon a pleasing prospect. There was the cove, sweeping in to the left, along the bluff opposite, which was high and rock-ribbed. At the head of the cove the shores were of clean, fine sand, broken here and there at intervals by a few patches of clam-flats, bared at low water. Out from where the boys stood, straight ahead rolled the bay, with an unbroken view away across to the cape, some five miles off. A thoroughfare, or reach, extended south and eastward from the cape, formed by the mainland and a chain of islands. Then, to the south, the bay extended far, broken only by some islands a few miles away. At anchor in the cove lay the Warren boys’ sailboat, the _Spray_, and the larger yacht, the _Viking_. “Well, George,” said Henry Burns, with his right arm over the other’s shoulder, “it looks like some fun, now that the trouble with Squire Brackett is cleared away.” “Great!” exclaimed George Warren.