“Go call ’em, Sammy,” said Mrs. Heard. “We want to start now, I suppose. It’s a long way to Parmenter Lake yet, isn’t it?”
Neale pulled out the much-thumbed guide.
“Let’s see,” he said, fluttering the pages. “There’s where we are—sixteen—no, seventeen miles beyond Procketts—where we bought the gasoline. That pond we just went to—Oh! that’s Silver Lake. I bet it used to be called ‘the mud-hole’ before the day of automobile road guides.
“Just beyond, along this road, is what the guide-book calls ‘a mountain tarn.’ What’s that, do you suppose?”
“A swamp,” declared Ruth, promptly and wrongly.
“It’s right near a village called Frog Hollow. Oh! ‘Recently renamed Arbutusville.’ What do you know about that?” chuckled Neale, delighted. “And a piece beyond there’s a precipice, ‘from the verge of which can be seen the ever-changing view of the entire eastern end of the Oxbow.’ Cricky! I bet the view isn’t half as changing as the names of these rural frog-ponds and the like. And I bet the precipice is a stone quarry,” he added, with conviction.
“I expect that ‘wayside inn’ they speak of,” said Agnes, who was looking over his shoulder, “is nothing but one of those squalid old beer-shops we see along the road.”
“Humph!” commented Mrs. Heard, with a sniff, “it must take more imagination to get up one of those road guides for automobilists than it does to find all the virtues in a Presidential candidate.”
Just then Sammy came plunging through the bushes. “Say!” he cried, “I can’t find ’em.”
“Why, Sammy!” said Agnes. “Why didn’t you call Tess and Dot?”