The Kenways were so busy at noon that they only “took a bite in their fists,” as good Mrs. MacCall would have expressed it. Ruth had been wise enough to buy some cooked food in the village before they came over to the camp, but she learned from some of the ladies in the tents that there was a woman in the neighborhood who baked bread to sell, and sometimes cookies and pies.
“You go to see Mrs. Bobster. She’s the nicest old lady!” declared one city matron. “Make your arrangements for bread now, Miss Kenway, for after she takes orders for as many as she can well supply, she wouldn’t agree to bake another loaf. She has a real New England conscience, and she wouldn’t promise to bake a single biscuit more than she knows she can get in her oven.”
The directions for finding Mrs. Bobster interested and amused the Corner House girls.
“She is the little old woman who lives in the shoe,” laughed their informant. “You can’t miss the house, if you go along the beach road toward town. It’s just beyond the other camp.”
“Oh!” cried Dot, eagerly, “I want to see the lady who lives in a shoe. She must have lots of children, for they were a great bother.”
“And,” said Tess, “do you suppose she does whip them all soundly and send them to bed with a piece of bread to eat?”
“We’ll discover all that,” promised Ruth, and soon after luncheon, having fixed up the tent, and set to rights their things that the expressman had brought over from the Spoondrift bungalow, the four sisters set out to find Mrs. Bobster.
The girls had ridden over from the village along the highroad, on which they had traveled two days before in the auto-stage. This lower, or “beach” road was a much less important thoroughfare. In places it followed the line of the shore so closely that the unusual high tides that had prevailed that spring, had washed a great deal of white sand across the swamp-grass and out upon it.
So, in places, the girls plodded through sand over their shoe tops. “Might as well go barefooted,” declared Agnes, sitting down for the third time to take off her oxfords and shake out the sand.
“You’d find it pretty different, if you tried it,” laughed Ruth. “This sand is hot.”