were Ralph and Felix and Barbara Brighton, of
all of whom you have heard."

"How have they heard, Tom?" asked Cousin Jasper, and the Beeman
smiled.

"I have been filling up their minds with family history, for I knew
that they must understand about this whole affair some day and it
would take too long to tell them all the facts at once. So we have
come now to the latest portion of the story," he went on, turning
again to the younger members of his audience, "to a period when three
cousins, Jasper Peyton, Anthony Crawford, and Tom Brighton used to
spend much time together when they were growing up.

"Jasper and I are first cousins, since my father was Ralph Brighton
and his mother was that younger sister, Barbara. I have had no
reluctance in telling you of that bitter mistake my father made and
the quarrel with his brother, for he spoke of it often himself and
said that, in all his life, he never learned a more valuable lesson.
Felix did not marry, since his zeal for the orchard and the bees and
later for farming on a larger and larger scale seemed to occupy his
every thought. It was he who reclaimed the marshy, waste ground in the
valley, 'for,' he said, 'it is wrong that we on the seaboard leave our
home acres and move farther and farther westward, looking for new land
that is easy to till. It is a wasteful policy, even for a new
country.' That was one of the things he had learned on his long
journey across the West and back again."

"But I do not understand about Anthony Crawford," put in Oliver. "I
haven't seen yet where he comes in at all."

"He calls us cousin, but it is a distant kinship, since he is grandson
of that Martin Hallowell who broke with his partner Reuben over the
matter of the _Huntress_. He used to come often to stay in Medford
Valley, for he had been left without parents and Felix Brighton was
his guardian. My Aunt Barbara, Jasper's mother, had lost her husband
early, and she went to live with her brother Felix in the yellow stone
farmhouse that had come to him from some earlier Hallowell who had
built it a hundred years ago. How we loved the place and how happy we
all were there, for I spent almost as much time under that wide,
friendly roof as did Anthony. How patient and good Jasper's mother
was to three mischievous, active boys, and how unceasingly, wisely
kind was Felix Brighton! He has done much for us, Jasper and me, and
he would, if he could, have made a man of Anthony.

"He was not