“It’s like a fire,” Jessie Carroll was saying; “you know people always save their old trash and leave their best things to burn up. Now I’m sure I’ve packed just the very things we won’t want and left at home the things we’ll need most. And that reminds me—Nan, can’t I put my best hat in your box? I just had to take my down comfortable, and it was so puffy it wouldn’t leave room for anything else.”
“Oh, don’t take your best hat,” cried Betty Miller; “we’re not going down to Long Beach to dress up and be giddy. It’s so late in the season none of the summer boarders will be there, and we’re just going to wear flannel frocks all day, and tramp in the woods and loll in the hammocks and get brown as berries and hungry as hunters and uncivilized as—as Hottentots.”
“Yes, Betty; but remember somebody has to cook for these hungry Hottentots,” said Mrs. Bond, smiling.
“Aren’t you afraid, girls, that you’ll get tired of cooking? And you’ll find that there’s a great deal of work connected with housekeeping if you do it all yourselves.”
“Oh, no, indeed, Mrs. Bond,” said Nan Kellogg. “I just love to cook, and I don’t mind housework a bit. Mamma thinks it will be good training for me.”
“Such doings!” exclaimed Grandma Bond, a lovely old lady of the silver-haired, apple-cheeked variety. “Living on chafing-dish foolery for two weeks! You’ll all be ill or starved to death in three days, and you’ll wish yourselves back in your comfortable homes.”
“Not we, grandma!” cried Betty. “We have a gas-stove and a range besides our beloved chafing-dish, and we won’t starve. But if Nan makes our Welsh rarebits I’ll not promise that we won’t be ill. Her concoctions are the stuff that dreams are made on. Oh, here’s Helen. What’s your misfortune, my pretty maid?”
Helen Morris came up on the veranda and dropped into a big wicker chair and fanned herself with her hat.
“Girls, I’m exhausted! You know I said I’d take all the things for afternoon tea, but I had no idea there were so many. Why, I’ve packed a whole barrel and they’re not all in yet. To be sure, it’s mostly tissue-paper and excelsior; but I was so afraid they’d break. And I couldn’t get the tea-cozy in at all, or the Dresden cups; I’d hate to break them.”
“Yes,” said Betty, sympathetically; “don’t break the tea-cozy, whatever you do, if it’s that pretty yellow satin one. But you’ve no ingenuity, Nell; why don’t you wear it down on your head? Then you’ll look like a drum-major.”