When the real lake came in view, the Dunns were breathless with excitement. They climbed down from the street car on the edge of a green meadow and the children walked gingerly across the turf, looking about them apprehensively, as if on the lookout for the warning, "Keep off the Grass." Isabel, who had fallen a little behind, galloped up to Peggy with a spring beauty in her hand.
"Miss Peggy!" She was breathing hard, but whether from her run or from excitement Peggy did not know. "Miss Peggy, kin they put me in jail for that?"
"O, dear!" Peggy cried, an unaccountable lump appearing in her throat. "They won't put you in jail for picking all the flowers you can carry home. Can't I make you understand that everything here belongs to everybody?"
It was a very wonderful picnic. Jimmy Dunn had visited the city park, and boasted a proud familiarity with trees and birds. But the other children could not recover from their amazement at seeing trees that did not grow in rows, out of squares obligingly left in cement sidewalks for that particular purpose, while the unexpected discovery of a blue bird was as startling as the appearance of a blue rabbit would be to the majority of people. "I thought birds was brown," drawled Johnny Dunn. "They is down 'round us."
"Maybe they gets sooty," suggested Estelle wisely. "My, wouldn't it be grand, though, if they'd get washed up, and be flying 'round all red and yaller and ev'ry color."
"LUNCHEON WAS SERVED SHORTLY AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL."
Luncheon was served shortly after their arrival. "I don't know why it is," Peggy confessed. "But it always seems as if you couldn't get fairly started on a picnic, till you'd had something to eat. I feel that way myself and I guess these children are just the same only more so." Accordingly they sat in a ring in the fresh young grass, and disposed of such quantities of sandwiches and doughnuts that the scientific estimate of the capacity of the human stomach was then and there proved incorrect, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Peggy expected that the gorged Dunns would find a period of inactivity necessary, but instead of stretching in somnolent attitudes under the trees when the moment arrived that they could hold no more, they scattered in all directions. As it seemed quite impossible that they should get into mischief or danger the girls left them to their own devices, and sat talking happily while the breeze brought the coolness of the little lake, and the fragrance of the apple orchards, mingled with more delicate scents, the perfume of the moist earth, the breath of tiny flowers fading unseen, perhaps, but making earth the sweeter for their blooming.
"I found some grand ones."
Peggy looked up smilingly into Estelle's radiant face. Then she got to her feet rapidly, for the child's hands were filled with early garden flowers, with several clusters of geraniums showing up dazzlingly among the more modest blossoms. "Where did you get them?" Peggy gasped.