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The other children—Ned and Ruth Talmage, Meredith, Jinks, Lavinia, and Dot Starr, turned at Don’s words to watch the two boys.

“Where under the sun did Don meet that boy?” whispered Lavinia to her brother Meredith.

“Say, Vene, where does Don find anything he wants to get hold of!” returned Meredith, chuckling at his younger brother.

“I know!” now declared Dot Starr, Don’s twin sister.

The others waited for her to explain, so she placed a hand at the side of her mouth to prevent the two strange boys from hearing what she whispered.

“They are newsboys who first heard of us at the ‘Tree of Light’ last Christmas. Ikey is the thin one and he was at that Easter Egg Picnic in Van Cortlandt Park, too. That’s where Don met him; Ikey had such a lot of eggs that we asked where he got all of them, ’cause we knew he couldn’t have had that many to start with. And he told——”

“S-sh! Not so loud, Dot! He’ll hear you. What did he tell you?” interpolated Jinks.

“Why, you know he works in a newspaper printing place where they hire boys to clean up messes of inks and trash, and run errands, too. Ikey got a lot of free tickets from the printer to some lecture and he traded them in, a ticket for every egg he could get. Then he told Don he was going to sell those eggs downtown to his friends.”