d other points of interest.

"Now you fellows have got to come on a little trip with me," Phil
Lawrence had said after he, Dave and Roger, with the others, had
returned again to the East. There was a small steamer belonging to Mr.
Lawrence that was tied up at Philadelphia getting ready for a trip to
Portland, Maine. The voyage up the Atlantic coast had been productive
of several unlooked-for results. On the way those on the boat had
discovered another vessel in flames. This was a craft being used by a
company of moving-picture actors, and some of the latter in their
panic had leaped overboard. Our young friends, as well as some of the
sailors on their ship, had gone to the rescue; and among others had
picked up a young man, Ward Porton by name. Much to the surprise of
Roger Morr and Phil Lawrence, Ward Porton had looked a good deal like
Dave. Not only that, but many of his manners, outwardly, were similar
to those of our hero.

Following the trip up the coast, it had been decided by the Wadsworths
and the Basswoods to spend part of the summer in the Adirondacks, at a
spot known as Mirror Lake. Thither all of the young people and some of
the older ones went to enjoy themselves greatly and to meet with a
number of strange happenings, all of which have been related in
detail in the volume preceding this, entitled "Dave Porter at Bear
Camp."

The boys fell in with a wild sort of creature whom they at first
supposed to be a crazy uncle of Nat Poole, the son of a miserly money
lender of Crumville. Later, however, the man was found to be a missing
uncle of Phil Lawrence, for whom the Lawrence family had been seeking
for a long time.

Although Dave Porter did not know it at the time, the moving-picture
company to which Ward Porton belonged had also numbered among its
members Dave's former school enemy, Link Merwell. From Link, Ward
Porton, who was the good-for-nothing nephew of a Burlington lumber
dealer, had learned the particulars concerning Dave's childhood and
how he had been placed in the Crumville poorhouse and listed as of
unknown parentage.

This had caused Porton to concoct a clever scheme, and to Mr. Porter
he announced himself as the real Dave Porter, stating that our hero
was really and truly the nobody that years before everybody had
thought him.

This announcement had come like a thunderbolt to poor Dave, and for
the time being he knew not what to do or say. The others, too,
especially his sister Laura an