“Dear me, Ted,” exclaimed the excited Nancy, “I can’t go; perhaps you had better open it. Why didn’t you fix up a little,” she argued, looking critically at the usual vacation boy. “You might at least have put on a white blouse.”

“To sell fish hooks?” roared Ted. “That’s a grand idea. Why, Nan, the fellows would think I was giving a party—”

The noise at the front of the store was now becoming so insistent that both brother and sister found it imperative to respond.

“Come on,” said Nancy, sighing rather miserably. “We may as well face it. But don’t let them back of the rope. We can’t wait on more than a few at a time.”

At that Nancy and Ted entered the store.

“Look—at—them!” gasped Ted.

Faces were pressed against the windows, the door, against every inch of outside space that could command a view of inside the store, and they looked so funny, the flat noses, the white spots on cheeks, the opened mouths, humping against the glass!

“Hello! Hello!” shouted Ted as Nancy fumbled with the door lock. “What do you think this is? A circus?”

Then, as Nancy opened the door, there was the unavoidable falling in!

“Please!” she begged. But the boys seemed actually massed as for some game.

“Hey there!” urged Ted. “Whoever doesn’t behave can’t get waited on a-tall!”

But his words had no effect upon the eager urchins.

“I want that rod over there!” shouted Rory Jennings. He was tall, big and noisy.

“That’s mine—that beaut in the window,” insisted another. Ted called him Shedder, or something that sounded like that.

“Hey, please, missus please,” begged a lad so freckled Nancy couldn’t see anything else but freckles. “Please missus,” he entreated, “couldn’t you just hand me over that crab net? That’s all I want.”

“Hey there! Stop crowdin’,” ordered a boy who was using all his strength to make matters worse. “She can’t wait on us if you don’t give her a chanst.”

There were easily twenty-five or thirty youngsters in the crowd, and Nancy felt quite 

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