"Dreadful!" said Miriam. "Imagine this great city designated as a town across the way from that little stream! It would be like the immense woman I saw the other day. I know she weighed over two hundred. There was a little man walking beside her, and he called her 'Birdie!' Indeed he did, and she called him 'Horatio!'"
"Our city started about here," said Ernestine, after the girls had stopped laughing, "or just at the foot of the hill, and grew first along the river. Later on it spread northward, and Fourth Street was one of its aristocratic streets."
"There comes Josie Thompson," said Fannie. "She's evidently bent on having a good time, and she's gotten up regardless. See that chain around her neck; plated, I'm sure."
"Don't look so sober, Ernestine," said Miriam. "There wouldn't be any use in living if you could not make fun of people once in a while."
"But perhaps Josie has never been taught any better at home," said Winnifred, suddenly thinking of the giants.
"She has eyes, hasn't she?" said Gretta. "But it seems to me she can't have ears, or else she couldn't help hearing that dress she has on. I know that's what my father would say."
Just then Josie came up to them. "Hello, girls! Going to have a good time? I tell you I am! Glad to have one day with no lessons to learn!" And she passed on with her friends, leaving the girls, even Ernestine, convulsed.
"Let's go on to the park," said Ernestine.
Accordingly they gathered up their baskets and other belongings. It was but a short walk, and they soon reached the spot where many of their schoolmates had already assembled.
At twelve o'clock the schools had a few simple exercises. The children sang, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," one of the girls of their grade recited "Woodman, Spare that Tree," and Fannie's father made a brief address. He talked to them of the part the forests play in helping to prevent drouths and disastrous floods. He told of the old Italian poet who called the trees "my brothers," and said that everyone, whether poet or not, should have especial tenderness and affection for these beautiful and useful bits of nature which grow up around us, relieving our eyes from the glare of day, shading us from the noonday sun, and giving us pleasure in many ways, so that their useless and wanton destruction becomes a sin against mankind.