Are you never going to try to talk? 
        You’re such a silent Polly! 
  Are you never going to say a word? 
    It isn’t hard; and oh! don’t you see
  The parrot is only a little bird,
    But he can chatter so easily. 
        You’re quite a dunce, my dolly!

  Let’s go and play by the baby-house: 
        You are my dearest Polly! 
  There are other things that do not grow;
    Kittens can’t talk, and why should you? 
  You are the prettiest doll I know;
    You are a darling—­that is true! 
        Just as you are, my dolly!

DAB KINZER:  A STORY OF A GROWING BOY.

BY WILLIAM O. STODDARD.

Between the village and the inlet, and half a mile from the great “bay,” lay the Kinzer farm.  Beyond the bay was a sand-bar, and beyond that the Atlantic Ocean; for all this was on the southerly shore of Long Island.

The Kinzer farm had lain right there—­acre for acre, no more, no less—­on the day when Hendrik Hudson, long ago, sailed the good ship “Half-Moon” into New York Bay.  But it was not then known to any one as the Kinzer farm.  Neither was there then, as now, any bright and growing village crowding up on one side of it, with a railway station and a post-office.  Nor was there, at that time, any great and busy city of New York, only a few hours’ ride away, over on the island of Manhattan.  The Kinzers themselves were not there then; but the bay and the inlet, with the fish and the crabs, and the ebbing and flowing tides, were there, very much the same, before Hendrik Hudson and his brave Dutchmen knew anything whatever about that corner of the world.

The Kinzer farm had always been a reasonably “fat” one, both as to size and quality, and the good people who lived on it had generally been of a somewhat similar description.  It was, therefore, every way correct and becoming for Dabney Kinzer’s widowed mother and his sisters to be the plump and hearty beings they were, and all the more discouraging to poor Dabney that no amount of regular and faithful eating seemed to make him resemble them at all in that respect.

Mrs. Kinzer excused his thinness to her neighbors, to be sure, on the ground that he was “such a growing boy;” but, for all that, he caught himself wondering, now and then, if he would never be done with that part of his trials.  For rapid growth has its trials.

“The fact is,” he said to himself, one day, as he leaned over the north fence, “I’m more like Ham Morris’s farm than I am like ours.  His farm is bigger than ours, all ’round; but it’s too big for its fences, just as I’m too big for my clothes.  Ham’s house is three times as large as ours, but it looks as if it had grown too fast.  It hasn’t any paint, to speak of, nor any blinds.  It looks a good deal as if somebody’d just built it there and then forgot it and gone off and left it out-of-doors.”