CHAPTER XXI.
BAD NEWS.
So sunshine follows storm! It was a jolly party aboard the _Merry Seas_, as she bowled along on her way from New Haven to New York.

It was composed of Frank Merriwell and a number of his intimate friends; and wherever Frank and his friends were, Dull Care usually hid his agued face and gave place to smiling Pleasure.
"That grumbling old boatman at the New Haven wharf was a liar!" groaned Dismal Jones, as if it were a grief that he had not found the boatman's unpleasant prognostications true.
"What did he say ?" asked Danny Griswold, who had been prancing the deck like a diminutive admiral, stopping now and blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke from his nostrils.
"He said that a smoker of cigarettes is always a measly runt!" grunted Bruce Browning, from the big chair in which he had ensconced himself almost as soon as he came aboard, and which he had hardly left since.
"You're another!" said Danny.

"He didn't say anything of the kind." "He was a poet," said Dismal, "and he threw his comment into rime.

I was taken in by him, I suppose, because he seemed to be half-way quoting Scripture: "'The Pharisees were hypocrites, And the _Merry Seas_ is a ship o' fits!'" "A ship o' fits?
Nothing eccentric about this steamer, so far as I can see!" "Except Danny Griswold!" exclaimed Bink Stubbs.

"He is enough to give anything fits." "Something your tailor is never able to give you!" Danny retorted.
"Sit down!" growled Browning.