“I hear water,” Rosie announced electrically. “Hark!”
They all stopped and listened. One by one they got the soft tinkle. Encouraged they kept on, rounding bushes and leaping rocks. The noise grew louder and louder. A rough trail suddenly appeared. They raced over it as fast as their burdens would permit. The sound was now a lovely musical splash. They came out on an open space, surrounded by pines and thickly carpeted with pine needles. At one side a great rock thrust out of the earth. Close beside it ran a tiny brook and just beyond the lee of the rock, the brook fell into a waterfall not more than a foot high. The children went wild with delight.
“Do you mean to tell me, Maida Westabrook, that you never knew this was here?” Rosie demanded.
“I never did,” Maida declared solemnly. “I have never seen it. I have never heard anybody mention it. Isn’t it a darling? What shall we call it? We must give it a name.”
Nobody had any names ready and everybody was too excited to think. In fact, at once they began wading up and down the little brook. They explored the neighborhood. Not far off they came upon a curious patch of country. A cleared circle, surrounded by pine trees and carpeted with pines, was filled with irregular lines of great rocks that lost themselves in the bushes on either side.
“I believe this is a moraine,” Maida exclaimed suddenly. “I’ve seen moraines in Europe.”
“What’s a moraine?” the others asked.
Maida explained how once the earth had been covered with great icecaps called glaciers and how in melting these glaciers had often left—streaking the earth’s surface—great files and lines of rock. “We’ll ask father to come here some day,” she ended. “He’ll know all about it. Billy Potter too—he knows everything.”
After a while, they came back to the waterfall. They swept aside the pine needles; spread the tablecloth on the ground; took food from the baskets; set it about in an inviting pile. The ice cream had not melted an atom in the freezer. The sandwiches, done up in wet napkins, were quite fresh. The eggs looked as inviting as hard-boiled eggs are bound to look. Everything was all right except that—and this produced first consternation, then laughter—there was no salt.
“We all reminded everybody else to remember the salt,” Maida said in disgust, “and so nobody put it in the basket.”