"Then look at us," went on Tom, not deigning to notice the interruption,
"rolling along smoothly at fifty miles an hour in a car that's like a
palace, with its cushioned seats and electric lights and library and
bath and soft beds and rich food and servants to wait upon us. We're
pampered children of luxury, all right, but I'm willing to bet that those
'horny-handed sons of toil' had it on us when it came to the real joy of
living."

"Tom was born too late?" chaffed Bert. "He doesn't really belong in the
twentieth century. He ought to have lived in the time of Ivanhoe, or
Young Lochinvar, or the Three Musketeers, or Robin Hood. I can see him
bending a bow in Nottingham Forest or breaking a lance in a tournament or
storming a fortress by day, and at night twanging a guitar beneath a
castle window or writing a sonnet to his lady's eyebrow."

"Well, anyhow," defended Tom, "those fellows of the olden time had good
red blood in their veins."

"Yes," assented Dick drily, "but it didn't stay there long. There were
too many sword points ready to let it out."

And yet, despite their good-natured "joshing" of Tom, they, quite as much
as he, were eager for excitement and adventure. In the fullest sense they
were "birds of a feather." In earlier and ruder days they would have been
soldiers of fortune, cutting their ways through unknown forests, facing
without flinching savage beasts and equally savage men, looking ever for
new worlds to conquer. Even in these "piping days of peace" that they so
much deplored, they had shown an almost uncanny ability to get into
scrapes of various kinds, from which sometimes they had narrowly escaped
with a whole skin. Again and again their courage had been severely tried,