Inside, the delighted children saw a room about as large as a good-sized pantry, and in this room a round table, three stools, a chair, and a tiny, rather rusty stove; opening from this room was a smaller one, with two cot-beds. The whole place was clean and in order, for Ben had taken great delight not only in having the key but in caring for the hut.
There was a sweet, dry odour of pine-wood about the place, and the afternoon sun had made the large room quite warm. “We must surely have our lunch here,” said Miss Ruth, “though we must be quick about it, for the sunlight will soon be gone.”
“Just seats enough to go around,” said Ben; “three stools for the girls, a chair for Miss Ruth—excuse me, Miss Ruth, I ought to have said you first,—and I’ll get the wooden box that I keep in the bushes for rubbish.”
Miss Ruth quickly spread a white napkin over the little table and took out the lunch,—first a great many ginger cookies, and these were carefully laid at one side; buttered thin biscuit next, three apiece, with slices of cold turkey laid in between, and lastly, some nuts and raisins.
Four pairs of hands reached out without delay, and in a surprisingly short time, sandwiches and cookies, nuts and raisins, every one of them, had vanished. And how good everything tasted, there in the snug, warm little hut, with the fragrant odour of the pines coming in through the open door.
“I wish, if we have the Easter Club, we could buy this hut and have our meetings here,” said Elsa. The longer she stayed in the hut, the better she liked it.
“It’s near my house,” Alice said; “you can see our chimneys from the door.”
“And we could furnish the hut with a lot of things,—dishes and pictures,” cried Betty. “And we could use the little room for a storeroom!”
Elsa had been thinking of other pleasures, so she said: “We could stay here and enjoy the birds and the trees and the wild flowers, in the spring.”
“Do you think we could buy or hire the hut, Ben?” asked Miss Ruth; for it certainly was a delightful place.