The party from Spoondrift bungalow got back in season to get luncheon; after which they rested and then bathed. It was the Corner House girls’ first experience of salt water bathing and they all enjoyed it—even Dot.
“It does make you suck in your breath awfully hard when the waves lap upon you,” she confessed. “But there was the Alice-doll sitting on the shore watching me, and so I couldn’t let her see that I was afraid!”
Ruth, more than the other girls, aided Pearl in looking after housekeeping affairs. It was she who discovered the broken lamp in the front hall.
The bungalow was lighted by oil-lamps, and they used candles in the bed chambers; while there was a marvelous “blue-flame” kerosene range in the kitchen.
Not all of the girls understood the handling of kerosene lamps, and Pearl told a funny story about her own little sister who had never seen any lights but gas or electric.
“When she came down here to Uncle Phil’s bungalow for the first time, she was all excited about the lamps. She told mamma that ‘Uncle Phil had his ’lectricity in a lamp right on the supper table. It’s a queer kind of a light, for they fill it with water out of a can.’”
The hanging lamp in the front hall was set inside a melon-shaped globe. Finding that, as Ruth pointed out, it could not be used, Pearl made another trip to the village before teatime and in the local “department store” bought another lamp.
“I am afraid you ought not to use that lamp, Pearl,” Ruth said, when she saw that the chimney was not tall enough to stick out of the top of the globe.
“Pooh! why not? Guess it’s just as good as the old chimney was,” said Pearl.
“Seems to me Mrs. MacCall says that chimneys should always be tall enough to come up through the globe. I don’t know just why——”