“The tastes of girlhood are much different now from what they were in my day,” said the lady, with a sigh. “When I was young we never thought of doing the things you girls do now.”
“Isn’t that why you didn’t do them?” asked Frank, slily. “Perhaps we girls of this generation have better-developed imaginations.”
“Oh, sure!” cried Ferd, with sarcasm. “You girls are wonders–just as smart as little Hen Rogers was last term when Miss Haley asked him if he could name any town in Alaska.”
“What did he say?” asked Frank, with interest.
“He said, ‘Nome’–and she sent him to the foot of the class,” chuckled Ferd.
“Oh! aren’t you smart?” railed Bessie. “That joke is the twin to the one about the boy who was asked by the professor in physics if he knew what ‘nasal organ’ meant. And the boy said ‘No, sir’ and got a ‘perfect’ mark.”
“Come on, folks!” cried Wyn. “Stop telling silly jokes and bear a hand here. All these things have to go into the boat.”
Mr. Jarley and Polly joined them just then, Mr. Jarley to collect the canoes and take them to the Forge, while Polly was to go with the two clubs aboard the newly-named Go-Ahead to Denton.
Polly, in a brand-new boating costume, was so pretty that the boys couldn’t keep their eyes away from her. She was happy, too, and this fact gave an entirely different expression to her face.
She was to go home with Wyn, and in a few weeks her father would follow and establish a home for them both in Denton. He was going, as Mr. Lavine declared, to start in his old home town just where he had left off more than ten years before. And Polly was to enter the academy with the girls of Green Knoll Camp on the opening day.