The girls laughed heartily over the Teddy Bear, and agreed that it was a delightful companion for their trip. Elise set him up on the little shelf above the washstand, and he gazed down upon them like a fat and good-natured patron saint. Patty named him Yankee Doodle, and gave him an American flag to hold; but Elise, not wishing to seem to slight the French nation, gave him a silken tri-colour of France to hold in his other paw. Apparently unprejudiced in his sympathies, Yankee Doodle held both flags, and continued to wear his jolly and complacent grin.
It was great fun for the girls to arrange their stateroom. As they expected to occupy it for the next ten days, they proceeded to make it as homelike as possible. They both had so many cabin bags and wall pockets and basket catchalls which had been parting gifts that it was difficult to find wall space for them all. Patty was to occupy the lower berth and Elise the wide and comfortable sofa. For they concluded they could chatter better if on a level. This left the upper berth as a broad shelf for books and magazines, boxes of candy, and all the odds and ends of their belongings.
"Isn't it perfectly wonderful," said Patty, "to think we are already miles away from land, and dancing away over this blue water!"
As Patty was standing on the sofa, with her head stuck out through the porthole, Elise could not hear a word of this speech; so unless the fishes were interested it was entirely lost. But this mattered little to Patty, and soon she pulled her head in and made the same remark over again.
"Well," said Elise, who was matter-of-fact, "when people take passage on an ocean steamer they often expect to get a few miles away from land after they start."
"Oh, Elise," cried Patty, "have you no imagination? Of course it isn't wonderful to consider the FACT of our sailing out to sea, but the IDEA of dancing away over the blue water is poetic and therefore wonderful."
"I'm glad you explained it to me, and I dare say the more the ship dances, the more wonderful it will be. And so let's get these things straightened out before the dancing grows mad and hilarious."
"All right," said Patty good-naturedly; and she went to work with a will, stowing away things and tacking up things, until everything was snugly in place.
Mrs. Farrington's maid accompanied the party, but both Elise and Patty, being energetic young Americans, had small use for her services. She was a help, though, in the matter of back buttons and hair ribbons, and she came now rapping at the stateroom door with a message from Mrs. Farrington that the girls were to dress for dinner. At the same moment the pretty bugle-call rang out that marked the half hour before dinner-time.
"Isn't it fun," cried Patty, "to have the dressing-bell a trumpet? Except at my own party the other night I've never been bugled to my meals. What shall we wear, Elise?"