“Wait!” urged Carrie, solemnly. “It’s nothing to laugh at. I began cooking it in a four quart saucepan, so as to give it plenty of room; and when father came in just before supper time, I had the whole top of our big range covered with pots and pans into which I had dipped the overflow of that two pounds of rice!
“Oh, yes, I had!” said Carrie, warmly, while the others screamed with laughter. “And I had gotten so excited by that time that I begged father to go out to the washhouse and bring in the big clothes boiler, so’s to see if I could keep the stuff from running over onto the stove.
“You never saw such a mess,” concluded Carrie, shaking her head. “And we had to eat rice for a week!”
It was just here that Agnes spied something far ahead beside the woodspath.
“Oh!” she cried, “are we in sight of the tent colony you tell about, so soon?”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Pearl Harrod. “We’re nowhere near the river.”
“But there’s a tent!” exclaimed Agnes, earnestly.
“And I see the top of another,” said Lucy Poole.
“Dirty brown things, both of them. Look more like Indian wigwams,” announced Ann Presby.
“My goodness, girls! there are the Gypsies Uncle Phil wrote about,” said Pearl, in some excitement. “Let’s get our fortunes told.”