“Greenridge! Greenridge! Have your tickets ready, please!”

There was a hoarse blast from the whistle and the steamer sidled in toward the wharf. Rodney Merrill, his brand new suitcase tightly clutched in his left hand and his ticket firmly held in his right, followed the dozen or so passengers who were crowding toward where three deck hands waited to push over the gangplank. As theHenry Hudson edged up to the landing the main street of the little town came suddenly into view, leading straight up the hill at a discouraging angle until lost to sight behind the overhanging branches of great trees. Rodney thought he had never seen so many trees before. They were everywhere—elms, maples, beeches and oaks—hiding the houses spread up the side of the ridge so that only here and there was visible a gray roof or a white wall or a red chimney top. Even here by the river edge the trees seemed to be trying to dispute the margin with the wharves and buildings. Where Rodney had come from folks first built houses and then planted trees, afterwards tending them as carefully as though they were rare flowers. Here, it seemed, folks had tucked their houses away in a veritable forest. He mentally compared the leaf-roofed street before him with Capitol Avenue, back in Orleans, Nebraska. Capitol Avenue was lined with trees, too, but the trees were as yet barely twelve feet high and cast about as much shade as would a lady’s parasol.

At the left of the wharf was a ferry slip, with a little brown shed beside it bearing the legend,Greenridge and Milon Ferry Company. A handful of people waited there under the shelter and watched the arrival of the river steamer. The paddles thrashed, the steamer shivered and bumped, the gangplank thudded to the wharf, and the disembarking passengers moved forward. Rodney followed, gave up his ticket, and found himself on land. He yielded his bag and trunk check to a hackman, asked directions, and with a farewell glance at theHenry Hudson gained the shadiest side of the ascending street.

It was still only a little after two o’clock and he had all the afternoon before him. Somewhere at the top of the hill was Maple Hill Academy, for which he was bound. But, as he would undoubtedly see quite enough of that institution during the next nine months, he was in no hurry to reach it. Rodney’s father had accompanied the boy to New York and had fully intended coming to Greenridge-on-Hudson with him, but, just as they had sat down to dinner in the hotel the evening before, an imperative telegram had reached him, and this morning Rodney had boarded a Hudson River steamboat and Mr. Merrill a Chicago train. Naturally Rodney had been disappointed, but he was quite used to his father’s erratic flights fr