Sunny Boy in the Big City Part 11

Sunny Boy shook his head. He got out of the swing with some difficulty and trotted over to his mother.

"Joe Brown's gone," he announced mournfully. "Maybe he was mad 'cause I didn't swing him."

Mrs. Horton closed her magazine.

"Joe gone?" she echoed. "Oh, I'm so sorry! No, precious, I don't think he was hurt because you didn't swing him. I'm afraid he didn't want to go up to the hotel with us and see Daddy. I hate to think of a boy his age all alone in New York."

However, Joe had gone, and they could not hope to find him. Sunny Boy and Mother walked a bit about the pretty rocky paths and peeped into one or two of the little rustic cabins they found perched in unexpected places, and then Mother glanced at her watch and said it was time to go home.

"Are you tired, dear?" she asked as they started to walk to the nearest entrance.

"I guess my feet are," confided Sunny Boy. "They trip."

They saw one other thing that interested them very much before they left the park.

"What's that mon'ment?" Sunny Boy asked suddenly, pointing to a tall shaft that ended in a point at the top.

"That's the Egyptian obelisk," returned Mrs. Horton. "Come and look at it, dear. It is called 'Cleopatra's Needle,' and was brought all the way from Egypt. It is very, very old."

"How old?" demanded Sunny Boy practically. "It looks all right, Mother."

"Well, I've read that it was erected in Cairo, Egypt, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ," said Mrs. Horton. "So you see, dear, we are looking at a stone that is more than three thousand years old."

They took a surface car down to the hotel, and Sunny Boy, who did not like to say he was tired, was glad to curl up in a chair and look at a book till Daddy and Mother were ready to go to dinner.

Everyone went to bed early that night, for Mr. Horton had had a busy day, too, and was tired. He was not able to go about with them the next day, but on the following Monday he took them over to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Sunny Boy actually went on board a battles.h.i.+p.

The afternoon of the same day they crossed the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge and, getting out of the trolley car half way over, saw New York City from the middle of the river.

"See the ferryboats!" cried Sunny Boy, peering down into the water.

"And there are, too, horses on 'em, just like the man said. Daddy, when can we go on a ferryboat?"

"That isn't so much to do," teased Mr. Horton. "I suppose we might go to-morrow. Olive, had you anything else planned?"

Mrs. Horton smiled and said that she had nothing in view more important than the ferryboat trip, so Sunny Boy went to bed that night to dream of riding a horse about the roof of a ferryboat while the Navy Yard band played and Joe Brown kept time like the band master.

CHAPTER VIII

THE FERRYBOAT RIDE

"Let's go away up front, Daddy, right up near the gate, so's I can see everything," suggested Sunny Boy eagerly, as he and Mother and Daddy entered the Twenty-third Street ferry house.

"All right. But let me get the tickets," said Mr. Horton, feeling in his pocket for change.

Sunny Boy was so short that he walked under the turnstile instead of through it, and the ticket man laughed when he saw him do it.

"Look out one of the sea gulls doesn't take you for a bite of breakfast," he called jokingly after him.

"Huh," Sunny Boy said resentfully to Mother, "I'm not so little. I know lots of children littler than I am. Wonder what he'd say if he saw Lottie Saunders going through his gate."

Lottie Saunders was a little friend of Sunny Boy's at home. She was not quite three years old.

There was a crowd of people waiting to get on the ferryboat and for a few minutes the Hortons had to stand at the closed door while the people on the boat walked off. There were a great many automobiles and horses and wagons and trucks coming off, too, and the drivers did a deal of shouting.

"Everybody's in a hurry," observed Sunny Boy, when the door was at last slid back and the crowd started to jostle its way on board.

Crowds are always in a hurry, if you have noticed it. They run and push and scramble to get somewhere, and then, when they are there, they sit down and rest or stand about contentedly, quite as though they did not know what hurrying meant.

"What do they do with the ropes?" asked Sunny Boy, as they went down the inclined plank and stepped on the ferryboat deck.

"They're what hold the boat in the slip," explained Mr. Horton. "If we stay on this back deck till the boat moves, you'll see the men take out those great hooks and wind the ropes on those wheels. Do you want to see them do it?"

Sunny Boy did, of course, and he waited till the gates were closed and the ropes loosened. Then two men, one on either side of the wharf, or slip, as they call the docks built for this kind of boat, gave a large spiked wheel one long, powerful turn, and it spun round rapidly, coiling up the ropes.

"Now we'll go up to the front," announced Mr. Horton, "and see what ails that noisy little tugboat we hear."

But Sunny Boy had made a discovery.

"Oh, Daddy!" he shouted. "There's a top! Let's go up!"

Mrs. Horton laughed.

"I'm sure Sunny will be an aviator when he grows up," she declared, smiling at her little boy. "He always wants to get as near to the sky as he can."

Sunny Boy was eager to climb the stairs to the second deck of the ferryboat, and he promised to help Mother up the stairs. So they went into the wide, pleasant cabin and up the broad staircase and came out on the sunny deck. There was a roof over it, and a cabin where people who did not like so much fresh air might sit, but Sunny Boy, of course, wanted to stand by the railing, and since it was a pleasant day, so did almost every one else.

"See the birds!" exclaimed Mrs. Horton, to whom a ferry trip was new too. "What do you suppose they find to eat?"

The gulls were flying gracefully above the water, sometimes coming close to the boat and now and then one would make a sudden dash down to the water, just dip his head in it and skim it with his wings, then soar up into the air again.

"I suppose they find bits of fruit and other refuse they can eat,"

replied Mr. Horton.

"That boat is going to run into the little flat one," said Sunny Boy positively, pointing an excited little forefinger at a fussy little tugboat making straight for a lazily floating barge loaded with coal.

"You watch," counseled Mr. Horton. "You can not see the rope because it is in the water, but that other tug up ahead is towing the barge.

She'll have it out of the way before the other boat gets there."

And the towing tug did just that, apparently without hurrying, and before the noisy tugboat reached the coal barge it drifted safely out of the way.

"Now you can see where we are going in," said Mr. Horton, pointing out a dark opening just ahead of them.

The slips were made like stalls, with piling driven down on either side, and beams nailed across them. As the ferryboat turned into her slip she b.u.mped smartly against the sides of the slip two or three times. It swayed, and Sunny Boy thought that there had been an accident.

"Oh, that often happens," his father a.s.sured them, as they stood a little to one side watching the people streaming off. "Sometimes, when it is very foggy, the boats have great difficulty in getting in, and sometimes an unusually high tide makes it hard for them, too."