Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott’s face. “Priscilla means that we are going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while the peas cook in the hot-water bath,” she explained. “Don’t you want to pack up the cookies? You will find them in that stone crock on the first shelf in the pantry, right behind the door. There’s a pasteboard box in there, too, that will do to put them in.”
“How many shall I put up?” questioned Elliott.
“Oh, as many as you think we’ll eat. And I warn you we have good appetites.”
Those were the vaguest directions, Elliott thought, that she had ever heard; but she found the box and the stone pot of cookies and stood a minute, counting the people who were to eat them. Four right here in the kitchen and five—no, six—out-of-doors. Would two dozen cookies be 54 enough for ten people? She put her head into the kitchen to ask, but there was no one in sight, so she had to decide the point by herself. After nibbling a crumb she thought not, and added another dozen. And then there was still so much room left that she just filled up the box, regardless. Afterward she was very glad of it. She wouldn’t have supposed it possible for ten people to eat as many cookies as those ten people ate after all the other things they had eaten.
By the time she had finished her calculations with the cookies, Aunt Jessica and Laura and Priscilla were ready. When Elliott emerged from the pantry, the little car was at the kitchen door, with a hamper and two pails of water in it, and on the back seat a long, queer-looking box that Laura told Elliott was a fireless cooker.
“Home-made,” said Laura, “you’d know that to look at it, but it works just as well. It’s the grandest thing, especially 55 when we want to eat out-of-doors. Saves lots of trouble.”
Elliott gasped. “You mean you carry it along to cook the dinner in?”
“Why, the dinner’s cooking in it now! Hop on, everybody. Mother, you take the wheel. Elliott and I will ride on the steps.”
Away they sped, bumpity-bump, to the hay-field, picking up the carrot-hoers as they went. It is astonishing how many people can cling to one little car, when those people are neither very wide nor, some of them, very tall. From the hay-field they nosed their way into a little dell, all ferns and cool white birches, and far above, a canopy of leaf-traceried blue sky. In the next few minutes it became very plain to the new cousin that the Camerons were used to doing this kind of thing. Every one seemed to know exactly what to do. The pails of water were swung to one side; the fireless cooker took 56 up its position on a flat gray rock. The hamper yielded loaves of bread—light and dark, that one cut for oneself on a smooth white board—and a basket stocked with plates and cups and knives and forks and spoons. Potted meat and potatoes and two kinds of vegetables, as they were wanted, came from the fireless cooker, all deliciously tender and piping hot. It was like a cafeteria in the open, thought Elliott, except that one had no tray.
And every one laughed and joked and had a good time. Even Elliott had a fairly good time, though she thought it was thoroughly queer. You see, it had never occurred to her that people could pick up their dinner and run out-of-doors into any lovely spot that they came to, to eat it. She wasn’t at all sure she cared for that way of doing things. But she liked the beauty of the little dell, the ferny smell of it, and the sunshine and cheerfulness. The occasional darning-needles, and small 57 green worms, and black or other colored bugs, she enjoyed less. She hadn’t been accustomed to associate such things with her dinner. But nobody else seemed to mind; perhaps the others were used to taking bugs and worms with their meals. If one appeared, they threw him away and went on eating as though nothing had happened.