The other boy was so like the girl that it was laughable. Exchange their garments and it would have puzzled the cleverest person to tell "t'other-from-which." To label them twins would have been superfluous. Nature had attended to that little matter fifteen years earlier in their lives, and even their old mammy used to say: "Now don' none of yo' other chillern go ter projectin' wid dem babies whilst I's got my haid turn'd 'way, cause if yo' does dey's gwine fer to get mixed pintedly, an' den I's gwine ter have ter spend a hull hour mebbe a-gettin' my mind settled pon which is which again."
Moreover, the fifteen years of daily association had only served to consummate what Dame Nature had so ably begun, for the girl and the boy almost thought and felt in unison. In all those years they had hardly been separated for a day. That is no further than a strict quarantine beneath the same roof had separated them, and that had been entirely Beverly's doings. At five she began the performance by contracting whooping-cough; at seven she tried mumps; at nine turned a beautiful lobster hue from measles, and at eleven capped the climax by scaring the family nearly to death with scarlet fever, and thereby causing her grandfather, Admiral Ashby, to exclaim:
"Lord bless my soul, Beverly, you are worse than the potato bugs; they _do_ skip the fatal second year now and again, but you never let up."
Perhaps this criticism had called a halt in her performances in the line of contagious diseases, for since the scarlet fever scare she had quit frightening the family into spasms, and at fifteen was as charming, healthy, and tantalizing a bit of girlhood as one could wish to see, though about as much of a tomboy as one could find.
While Beverly Ashby is squabbling good-naturedly with her brother and chum, suppose we take this opportune moment in which to learn something about the trio?
Beverly and her brother, Athol, had elected to enter this world exactly fifteen years and four months prior to the opening of this story. They also chose the thirteenth of May, 1897, to spring their first surprise upon their family by arriving together, and had managed to sustain their reputations for surprising the grownups by never permitting a single year to pass without some new outbreak, though it must be admitted that Beverly could certainly claim the greater distinction of the two in that direction.