“I thought you were going to carry your camera, Alice,” said Mrs. Merrill quietly, “and one thing for each girl is enough to look after. Suppose going down we pack yours and my things together in the suit case and let Mary Jane have her own toilet things and extra dress in the little grip. It isn’t too heavy for her to carry if she must. Then you can have your camera. Coming back you may not want to take so many pictures. We might pack your camera in the trunk and then you could have your things in the grip and take your turn traveling like a lady all alone. How would that be?”
Both girls were pleased with that plan so Mrs. Merrill said she would get just the right things to put in the bags while the girls went to tell their best friends good-by.
Mary Jane’s little chum, Doris Dana, lived next door, so she didn’t have far to go. Doris was at home and half way expecting Mary Jane because she knew that the Merrills were to leave early in the morning. She pulled Mary Jane into the living room in a jiffy and showed her a big book of pictures she had been looking at. “Look at these, Mary Jane,” she cried, “and these and these and these! Mother says you’ll see them all down South. Oh, dear, but I wish I was going too!”
Mary Jane had never seen the big picture folder before (her father had promised that she should have one and he was to bring it to her that very evening) and she was as interested as Doris in the wonderful pictures it contained. They spread the folder out on the floor and looked at the big orange trees, the palm trees and the heavy Spanish moss that made every sort of tree look so queer. They looked at rivers and lakes and, most wonderful of all, a family of alligators.
“I like those best,” said Doris positively, “and why I like ’em is because they’re so awful. I wish I had one, I do.”
“Do they really grow that way?” asked Mary Jane of Doris’s mother.
“Indeed they do,” laughed Mrs. Dana. “I’ve seen hundreds of them just like that picture and you will too.”
“Oh, bring me one! Bring me one!” cried Doris; “will you, Mary Jane?”
Before Mary Jane had a chance to answer the telephone rang and Mrs. Dana took a message from Mrs. Merrill that Mary Jane was to come home at once. So, with a hasty promise whispered in Doris’s ear, that she would surely send an alligator, Mary Jane ran skipping across the snowy lawn to her home.
When dinner was over an hour later, Mr. Merrill went to the hall and took from his coat pocket a bundle of railway folders.