so cold Mother won't let us."

"You have been away a lot, haven't you?" suggested David.

Sunny Boy considered.

"I had to go to see my Grandpa Horton," he urged. "And then I had to
go to see my Aunt Bessie. And Daddy would be lonesome in New York
without Mother and me. He said so."

You see, Sunny Boy had had a busy summer. First he and his mother had
gone into the country to visit his grandfather who lived on a farm.
Sunny Boy was named for this grandfather, "Arthur Bradford Horton,"
though Daddy and Mother called him Sunny Boy, and many people thought
he had no other name. Grandfather Horton's farm was known as
"Brookside," and Sunny Boy learned to love the place dearly in the
month he spent there. You may have read what he did there and the
friends he made in the first book about him, called "Sunny Boy in the
Country."

After Sunny Boy and his mother came home from "Brookside," they went
almost immediately to visit Mrs. Horton's sister, Sunny's Aunt
Bessie, in her bungalow at Nestle Cove. Mr. Horton took them down to
the seashore in the automobile, and Sunny Boy had a delightful time
playing in the sand and learning to swim. He found a little lost dog,
too, as you may remember if you have read the book about him called
"Sunny Boy at the Seashore."

Now he was at home again in Centronia, the city where he and his daddy
and mother lived, and they were getting ready to make a trip to the
great city of New York.

"Where 'bouts does your cousin live?" Sunny Boy asked Harold Wallace,
hoping his friends understood that all this traveling he was
experiencing was truly necessary. "P'haps Mother and I'll see him."

"I don't know exactly where he lives," answered Harold cautiously.
"But I know it is in a brick row. Aunt Lucy wrote my mother when they
moved."

"I'll tell Daddy," promised Sunny Boy confidently. "He'll know what
street. Don't get out, Oliver."

Oliver Dunlap, red-haired and blue-eyed, grinned provokingly.

"Wait till you see me," he retorted. "Can't I put just one foot out of
the car?"

Of course, having one foot out, Oliver in another moment had both feet
on the running board and from there jumped to the sidewalk.

"Daddy said to stay in the car," insisted Sunny Boy.

"He only meant not to go away," said Oliver. "Oh, look at the crowd
coming!"

The children stood up in the car and stared in the direction Oliver
was pointing. On the next block they could see a man running swiftly,
followed b