“I wonder what those girls have been doing with Miss Haynes,” said Billy Baxter to his companion. “That’s all the S. P.’s are, a nature club! Seeking, searching, strolling, I’ve got it, the Strolling Pilgrims. Wait till I write that on the blackboard Monday morning!”
CHAPTER VII
THE BLACK WIZARDS’ DILEMMA
How the girls worked that next week! Mere incidentals like lessons would come in to detain them, or hinder them from spending every minute on that precious new “club room,” the Attic Marvel of the Ages, as Judge Gordon called it. “Grecian architecture has had a remarkable reputation, Jean,” said he, and then it dawned upon Jean, who was having history, that Attic with a capital letter meant pertaining to Athens or Attica, or something Grecian. “Oh, you crazy Daddy!” she exclaimed. But to the girls she chuckled over their “Greek art,” as they put up the curtains with the peacock and birds of paradise and twining vines with flowers.
One of the pieces of furniture “rescued from oblivion” was a small bookcase. That they set up in the sanctum sanctorum and began to fill. Molly brought the tree book and a big botany text of her father’s. Jean put in the zoology text and an old copy of Hooker’s Natural History. Fran’s aunt, who was visiting for a few days, promised to send her a field book of wild flowers. Leigh brought over a book on butterflies and said that her father had promised to duplicate for her whatever Miss Haynes had for birds. “He’s going to write to a big book firm in the East, too, and find out everything there is!” she announced. “My birthday comes in May, and if I want to, I can have books for the club.”
The Witches’ Caldron would not go so well in the middle of the room because of the electric bulb attachment. It was given a decorated corner, with draperies attached above in such a way that the caldron could be concealed when desired. It was an immense iron kettle, used in days far back for making soft soap, an article of manufacture of which none of these girls had ever heard. But the kettle had belonged to Mrs. Gordon’s family heirlooms and had been brought by her from their former home to this one. Both Judge and Mrs. Gordon were of families in these regions.
There was an animated discussion about whether they should call themselves witches, or sibyls, when in the performance of initiations and the like. “Sibyl” was more classic. The name, moreover, began with S. But did Sibyls ever have kettles? The judge gave it as his opinion, based on a Latin classic, that they had caves, though he said that the kettle and its contents might be symbolic of the bubblings of the subterranean and volcanic lavas. S. P. might be the Sibyl’s Portent, the Sibyl’s Pit or the Sibyl’s Potion.
“Thanks for the suggestions, Daddy,” said Jean demurely, “but we are not announcing our name as yet.”
The spinning wheel and a few other antiquated interesting relics were left as decorative to the wider expanse of attic outside of the room, but the room itself was made cozy. The old grate that belonged in the small fireplace was found among the rest of what the judge called “junk.” Several very good chairs were mended and placed in the sanctum, along with an old-fashioned kettle, which needed only a little soap and water first, then some gay paint, to make it suitable.
Fran had found in her attic an immense majolica jar in bright colors. This she had brought over in her brother’s Ford coupe, although she had been asked what she was going to do “with that hideous thing.”