| MENU. | |
| An egg Canoe | A Skiff of pickle |
| A Cheese Raft too. | Your taste to tickle. |
| Turtles galore, | Entrée of Whales |
| Found alongshore. | (A la sardine tails). |
| Chips in a pile, and | |
| A Sandwich Island. | |
| The Brig Watermelon | An orange boat last |
| With sails all a-swellin'. | With a candy mast. |
| The Island of Cake | |
| With fish from Sweet Lake. | |
Mary gave the signal when everything was ready, a long toot on an old tin whistle that sounded like a fog-horn. She blew it through the keyhole of the parlour door, expecting a speedy answer, but was not prepared for the sensation her summons created. The door flew open so suddenly that she was nearly taken off her feet, and the boys fell all over each other in their race for the table. When they were all seated, Norman, standing up at the foot of the table, repeated the rhyme which Joyce had carefully taught him:
"Heave ho, my hearties, let these boats
Sail down the Red Sea of your throats."
"They're surely obeying orders," said Mary, mournfully, a few minutes later, when she hurried into the kitchen for another Sandwich Island. "They're swallowing up those boats quicker'n the real Red Sea swallowed up old Pharaoh and all his chariots. There'll be nothing left for us but the rinds and the broom-straws."
"Oh, yes, there will," said Joyce, cheerfully, opening the pantry door and showing her three plates on the lower shelf. "There is our supper. I put it aside, for boys are like grasshoppers. They'll eat everything in sight. I didn't take time to put sails in my boats or in mother's, but you've got one of every kind just like the boys, even to a menu-card with a fish-hook in it."
There was a broad smile on Mary's beaming little face as she surveyed her part of the feast, and popping one of the fat raisin-turtles into her mouth, she hurried back to her duties as waitress. Joyce followed to pass around the birthday cake, telling each boy to blow out a candle as he took a slice, and to make a birthday wish.
Just as she finished there was a click of the gate-latch, and one of her schoolmates came up the path. It was Grace Link, one of her best friends, yet Joyce wished she had not happened in at that particular time.
Grace had a way of looking around her with a very superior air. It may have been due to her effort to keep her eye-glasses in position, but Joyce found it irritating at times. The glances made her feel how shabby the little brown house must look in comparison to the Links' elegant home, and she resented Grace's apparent notice of the fact.
"In just a minute, Grace," she called, thinking she would pass the cake around once more, and leave the boys to finish quietly by themselves. But she did not have a chance to do that. With a whoop as of one voice, each boy started up, grabbing another slice of cake in one hand as he passed the plate, and all the candy fish he could scoop up with the other, and was off for a noisy game of hum-bum in the back yard.