te
now. Anyhow, you may go and put on your other clothes."

"My wedding suit?" asked Dab.

"No, indeed! I mean your old ones,--those you took off night before
last."

"Dunno where they are," slowly responded Dab.

"Don't know where they are?" responded a chorus of four voices.

"No," said Dab. "Bill Lee's black boy had em on all yesterday afternoon,
and I reckon he's gone a-fishing again to-day. They fit him a good sight
better 'n they ever did me."

If Dabney had expected a storm to come from his mother's end of the
table, he was pleasantly mistaken; and his sisters had it all to
themselves for a moment. Then, with an admiring glance at her son, the
thoughtful matron remarked,--

"Just like his father, for all the world! It's no use, girls: Dabney's a
growing boy in more ways than one. Dabney, I shall want you to go over
to the Morris house with me after breakfast. Then you may hitch up the
ponies, and we'll do some errands around the village."

Dab Kinzer's sisters looked at one another in blank astonishment, and
Samantha would have left the table if she had only finished her
breakfast.

Pamela, as being nearest to Dab in age and sympathy, gave a very
admiring look at her brother's second "good fit," and said nothing.

Even Keziah finally admitted, in her own mind, that such a change in
Dabney's appearance might have its advantages. But Samantha inwardly
declared war.

The young hero himself was hardly used to that second suit, as yet, and
felt any thing but easy in it.

"I wonder," he said to himself, "what Jenny Walters would say to me now.
Wonder if she'd know me."

Not a doubt of it. But after he had finished his breakfast, and gone
out, his mother remarked,--

"It's really all right, girls. I almost fear I have been neglecting
Dabney. He isn't a little boy any more."

"He isn't a man yet," exclaimed Samantha. "And he talks slang
dreadfully."

"But then, he does grow so!" remarked Keziah.

"Mother," said Pamela, "couldn't you get Dab to give Dick Lee the slang,
along with the old clothes?"

"We'll see about it," replied Mrs. Kinzer.

It was very clear that Dabney's mother had begun to take in a new idea
about her son.

It was not the least bit in the world unpleasant to find out that he was
"growing in more ways than one," and it was quite likely that she had
indeed kept him too long in roundabouts.

At all events, his great idea had been worked out into a triumphant
success; and, bef