So far as Elliott could see they asked everybody except townspeople. The telephone was kept busy that night and the next morning in the intervals of Mother Jess’s and the girls’ baking. Elliott helped pack up dozens of turnovers and cookies and sandwiches and bottled quarts of lemonade.
“The lemonade is for the children,” said Laura. “The rest of us have coffee. Don’t you love the taste of coffee that you make over a fire that you build yourself in the woods?”
“On picnics I have always had my coffee out of a thermos bottle,” said Elliott.
“Oh, you poor thing! Why, you haven’t had any good times at all, have you?”
Laura looked so shocked that for a minute 165 Elliott actually wondered whether she ever really had had any good times. Privately she wasn’t at all sure that she was going to have a good time now, but she kept still about that doubt.
“Aren’t you afraid it may rain to-morrow?” she asked.
“No, indeed! It never rains on things Mother plans.”
And it didn’t. The morning of the picnic dawned clear and dewy and sparkling, as perfect a summer day as though it had been made to the Camerons’ order. By nine o’clock the big hay-wagon had appeared, driven by Mr. Gordon himself, who said he was going to turn over the reins to Mr. Cameron when they reached the Gordon farm. Two more horses were hitched on and all the Camerons piled in, with enough boxes and baskets and bags of potatoes, one would think, to feed a small town, and away the hay-wagon went down the hill, stopping at house after 166 house to take in smiling people, with more boxes and baskets and bags.
It was all very care-free and gay, and Elliott smiled and chattered away with the rest; but in her heart of hearts she knew that there wasn’t one of these boys and girls who squeezed into the capacious hay-wagon to whom she would have given a second glance, before coming up here to Vermont. Now she wondered whether they were all as negligible as they looked. And pretty soon she forgot that she had ever thought they looked negligible. It was the jolliest crowd she had ever been in. One or two were a bit quiet when they arrived, but soon even the shyest were talking, or at least laughing, in the midst of the happy hubbub. It seemed as though one couldn’t have anything but a good time when the Camerons set out to be jolly. Alma Gordon and the little Bliss girls were the last to squeeze in and they rode away waving their hands violently 167 to a short, fat woman and a tall, fat girl, who waved briskly from the brick house’s front door.
Then Mr. Cameron turned the horses into a mountain road and they began to climb. Up and up the wagon went with its merry load, through towering woods and open pastures and along hillsides where the woods had been cut and a tangle of underbrush was beginning to spring up among the stumps. And the higher the horses climbed the higher rose the jollity of the hay-wagon’s company. The sun was hot overhead when they stopped. There were gray rocks and a tumbling mountain brook and a brown-carpeted pine wood. Everybody jumped out helter-skelter and began unloading the wagon or gathering fire-wood or dipping up water, or simply scampering around for joy of stretching cramped legs.