Read Ebook: Sunny Boy at the seashore by White Ramy Allison Wrenn Charles L Charles Lewis Illustrator

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Ebook has 982 lines and 33354 words, and 20 pages

I AN UNEXPECTED RIDE 9

II ENDING A BUSY DAY 23

V SUNNY BOY'S SURPRISE 65

VI ON THE WAY 78

X THE MARSHMALLOW ROAST 131

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

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."

"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."

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