Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
[Illustration: “Ralph!” gasped Sunny Boy. “Look! My boat’s untied!”
(_See Page 190_)
]
SUNNY BOY
AT THE SEASHORE
BY
RAMY ALLISON WHITE
Author of
“SUNNY BOY IN THE COUNTRY,” “SUNNY
BOY AT THE SEASHORE,” ETC.
_ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES L. WRENN_
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Copyright, 1920
By
BARSE & CO.
SUNNY BOY AT THE SEASHORE
_Printed in the United States of America_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I AN UNEXPECTED RIDE 9
II ENDING A BUSY DAY 23
III GETTING READY 38
IV HELPING HERE AND THERE 50
V SUNNY BOY’S SURPRISE 65
VI ON THE WAY 78
VII A DAY WITH DADDY 91
VIII MAKING NEW FRIENDS 104
IX THE FORT BUILDERS 116
X THE MARSHMALLOW ROAST 131
XI SUNNY BOY TO THE RESCUE 142
XII SUNNY BOY IS NAUGHTY 154
XIII CURLY IS FOUND 169
XIV LOST ON THE OCEAN 181
XV A HAPPY ENDING 199
ILLUSTRATIONS
“Ralph!” gasped Sunny Boy. “Look! My boat’s untied!” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
Upstairs Sunny Boy found his toys exactly as he had left them 55
Sunny Boy crawled carefully through the doorway of the fort 119
Sunny Boy’s horse went up and down—in time to the music 161
SUNNY BOY AT THE SEASHORE
CHAPTER I
AN UNEXPECTED RIDE
“Oh, Ruth! Oh, Nelson! O-hoo!” Sunny Boy puckered up his mouth and
tried his best to whistle, but he couldn’t quite manage it.
“Ru-th! Nelson!” he shouted again. “Come on over! I want to tell you
something!”
Then up the steps from the laundry in the basement of their house,
where they had been hunting string for a kite, came Nelson and Ruth
Baker, who lived next door.
Sunny Boy stood in the gateway his father had cut in the fence between
the two yards and danced up and down impatiently.
“Hurry up!” he urged them. “Listen! We’re going to the seashore day
after to-morrow! Mother said so.”
Nelson sat down comfortably on the grass. He was rather a fat boy.
“We’re going to the mountains to visit my grandmother, next week,” he
said. “But you just got back from being away.”
And indeed Sunny Boy and his mother had returned the night before from
a long visit with Sunny’s Grandpa Horton who lived on a beautiful farm.
Little Ruth Baker, who was only four years old, beamed cheerfully at
Sunny Boy.
“We went to the seashore while you were gone,” she informed him. “The
water was very wet. I went paddling, but Nelson wore a bathing suit.”
“I’ve a bathing suit, too,” announced Sunny Boy. “The brook at
Grandpa’s was too cold, so I didn’t wear it. But I’m going to learn to
swim down at Nestle Cove. Daddy’s going to teach me.”
Nelson looked up from straightening out the tangle of string.
“Did you sleep on the train going to your grandpa’s?” he asked. “We
have to stay two nights, an’ eat and sleep an’ everything on the train
before we get to my grandma’s.”
Sunny Boy, stretched full length in his express wagon, kicked his heels
excitedly.
“We ate on the train,” he said eagerly. “But—what you think?—we’re
going to Nestle Cove in Daddy’s new automobile!”
“I saw it out in front yesterday,” Nelson volunteered. “It’s a nice big
one. I’ll bet I could most run one!”
“P’haps,” admitted Sunny Boy doubtfully. “Anyway, you have to be
grown-up before they let you—Daddy said so. Mother’s going, an’
Harriet, an’ Aunt Bessie and Miss Mart’son.” Sunny Boy meant Miss
Martinson, a school teacher and Aunt Bessie’s best friend, but his
tongue had a trick of skipping letters when he pronounced long words.
“And Aunt Bessie has a house with a big porch, and she says I can sleep
in a hammock like a sailor if I want to. An’ I’m going to make a fish
pond in the sand.”
“Look out you don’t get scared by a crab,” Nelson advised him. “Ruth
did. She screamed and screamed. I went fishing with my daddy on a great
long pier, but we didn’t catch anything.”
“I saved all the pebbles,” Ruth began hopefully.
“I went fishing in the brook.” Sunny Boy was forgetting that it isn’t
polite to interrupt another.
“I got so sunburned it all peeled off, and then—” Nelson was eager to
tell his experiences, too.
“My goodness, children, how you do chatter!” Mrs. Baker opened the gate
in the fence and beckoned smilingly to her youngsters. “Hello, Sunny
dear. Glad to be home again? Ruth, Mother needs you now to try on the
new frock, and, Nelson, you’ll have to go to the store for me. Come
right away, dears—you’ll see Sunny again before he goes away.”
Nelson gathered up his string obediently and trotted through the gate.
Ruth slipped her hand into her mother’s and followed him. Left alone,
Sunny Boy wiggled to a more comfortable position in his wagon and gave
himself up to pleasant thoughts of the coming trip.
“Look here, Sunny Boy, your brains will be absolutely baked!” Aunt
Bessie descended on him from the back porch. “My dear child, this yard
is the warmest place in the city in the morning. Your mother asked me
to see what you were doing. Why don’t you go out in front and play
where it is shady?”
“With you?” asked Sunny Boy happily.
Aunt Bessie sat down on one end of the wagon which tipped perilously,
and hugged him.
“No, lambie, not with me,” she answered. “I must run home and help
Harriet pack another box, and then I am to meet Betty Martinson and buy
a porch swing. After that, let’s see—after that I have to give a little
girl a music lesson. But when we get to the seashore I’ll play with
you.”
“All right,” agreed Sunny Boy sensibly. “But couldn’t you stay a
minute, Auntie?”
“Not half a minute, honey.” Aunt Bessie rose and smoothed out her
pretty blue linen frock. “You run along now and don’t go far away,
because it will be lunch time before you know it.”
A big black ant crawled across the cement walk at Sunny’s feet.
“I wonder what Jimmie is doing now?” said Sunny Boy aloud, remembering
how careful Jimmie always was not to step on the tiniest ant.
Jimmie was the nineteen year old boy who helped Grandpa Horton farm in
summer and who went to an agricultural college in winter. Sunny Boy and
he had grown to be great friends during the month Sunny and his mother
had spent at Brookside, which was the name of the farm where Grandpa
and Grandma Horton lived.
Sunny Boy was named for his grandfather, “Arthur Bradford Horton,” as
you may have read in my first book about him called, “Sunny Boy in
the Country.” His father and mother called him “Sunny Boy” because he
was usually such a cheerful laddie. Even when he got into scrapes—and
in the month he spent at the farm he lost his grandfather’s Liberty
Bonds and had a horse run away with him—the troubles were somehow
straightened out for him and left him smiling again.
Now he and his mother had left Brookside and dear Grandpa and Grandma
Horton, and with Daddy Horton had come back to their city home to get
ready for a visit to the seashore. Aunt Bessie, who was Mrs. Horton’s
sister, and her friend Miss Martinson had rented a bungalow at Nestle
Cove, and they wanted Sunny Boy and his mother to come and stay with
them.
The sun was blazing down into the back yard, and it really was very
hot. Sunny Boy took his wagon down the laundry steps into the house,
stopping for a moment to get a drink of water at the sink, on through
the front basement hall and up the steps out into the street.
“Well, well, you back?” The postman, on the steps of the Bakers’ house,
smiled at him. “Have a nice time?”
“Oh, yes,” said Sunny Boy, with satisfaction. “An’ day after to-morrow
Daddy’s going to take us in the auto to Nestle Cove.”
“Well, you _are_ having a fine summer,” replied the postman heartily.
“Don’t get so tanned that, when you come back, I might take you for a
little chocolate boy, will you?”
“Oh, no,” Sunny assured him. “I don’t mean to.”
Whistling pleasantly, the postman went on up the street, and Sunny Boy,
pushing his wagon idly back and forth by the tongue, thought that when
he grew up he would be a postman too.
“But I don’t know whether I’d like to be a postman in the city where
I’d see a lot of people and know such a lot of children, or be one in
the country, like the postman that comes to Brookside farm, and ride
around all day in a buggy. That would be fun. I could know children in
the country, too. There was an awful lot of Hatch children, seven of
them.”
Sunny Boy was thinking of the children of the tenant who lived on
Grandpa’s farm, and with whom he played while he was visiting at
Brookside.
“’Lo!” called the girl across the street, sweeping the pavement.
“Hello!” responded Sunny politely.
She had red hair and that reminded him of Araminta, the little girl at
Grandpa Horton’s house. He wished Araminta lived in the city where he
could see her every day. Sunny Boy, you will perceive, had what his
Aunt Bessie called a “wishing fit” this summer morning.
“Out of my way, kid!” A thin, freckle-faced boy with the lightest hair
and eyebrows Sunny Boy had ever seen leaped from the laundry wagon that
drew up to the curb. “Haven’t any time to fool this morning. This 266
Glenn Avenue? Yep? Well, hustle now and don’t keep me waiting for those
shirts to be done up. Rush order, too, it is.”
Sunny Boy had a dim idea that this boy was poking fun at him, and he
frowned a little. But Mrs. Horton had heard through the screen door,
and she came, bringing the package of shirts.
“Are you sure they will be returned to-morrow?” she asked anxiously.
“We leave early Thursday morning.”
“Oh, they’ll be ready in plenty of time,” said the boy reassuringly.
“Don’t you worry—the Star Laundry never breaks its word; we can’t
afford to.”
He ran down the walk, tossed the package into the back of the wagon,
and hurried across the street to another house.
Mrs. Horton laughed.
“What a very important young man!” she said. “Well, Sunny Boy, are you
having a good time? Where are Ruth and Nelson?”
“They had to go in,” answered Sunny Boy. “Mother, could I get an
ice-cream cone?”
“Not before lunch, dear,” decided Mrs. Horton. “Now I have to finish
the mending. Keep out of the sun, won’t you? It’s one of the warmest
days we’ve had.”
She closed the screen door and Sunny returned to his express wagon.
“I could tie it on back,” he said aloud.
The laundry wagon was still standing where the freckle-faced boy had
left it, and the horse was slowly but surely going to sleep, “right in
his tracks,” as Harriet would have said had she been there to see. His
head kept nodding lower and lower, and Sunny Boy privately decided that
the only thing that kept it from hitting the asphalt was the big round
collar the horse wore.
Sunny Boy got up from the step and walked down to the wagon, dragging
his express cart behind him. He had often seen other boys tie their toy
wagons on behind real wagons, and he knew exactly how it was done.
“I’ll just pretend,” he told himself, glancing up at the windows of the
house uneasily. “I won’t really go for a ride.”
There was no one to see him knot the rope firmly and make the express
cart fast to the laundry wagon. He climbed in and had a blissfully
thrilling moment making believe that he was part of an express train.
“I’ll be the baggage car,” he thought. “Toot! Toot!”
Then from across the street came whirling the breezy laundry-wagon boy.
This time he had no parcel, but leaped into his seat and took up the
reins without going round to the back of his wagon.
“Gid-ap, Lazy-Bones!” he cried to the sleepy horse. “What do you think
this is—a cab-stand? Gid-ap!”
And Sunny Boy and his wagon moved gently off down the street.
He could easily have tumbled out, but that would mean to lose his
wagon. And the laundry boy was whistling so shrilly through his teeth
that there was no hope of being able to make him hear, even if he
called out. Besides, Sunny Boy thought that he might very likely be
cross and scold about small boys hitching to his wagon.
“I—I—don’t believe Mother would like it,” said poor Sunny Boy
forlornly, as the horse broke into a gentle trot.