Miles Stackpole.”
“That’s a nice letter from the Eagle Scout,” commented Gheezies, handing the sheets back to Morning-Glory, “and Toiney’s mongrel scrawl is worth keeping. Now for the best letter of all which I have kept for the last on this our first meeting after Christmas when, as we agreed, we are talking over our camping experiences, remembering absent friends and dwelling on the messages they sent us! This is from Kitty—Kitty Sill—our Camp Fire Sister!” The Guardian jubilantly waved an envelope. “In it she tells of how she, little chicken-hearted, orchard Kitty, who——”
“Who, as Captain Andy used to say, was ‘shy as a long-billed curlew’!” interjected Olive in low, laughing tones. “I beg your pardon, Gheezies, for interrupting!”
“Yes, how ‘shy’ Kitty has been instrumental in starting another Camp Fire group among the girls of her scattered neighborhood and has induced their school-teacher to act as Guardian. Now, what do you suppose they’re going to call this new Camp Fire?”
“’Twouldn’t be Kitty if it wasn’t original,” chuckled Morning-Glory. “It’s altogether too bad that they can’t enroll Mary-Jane Peg!”
“They’ve decided to call it the Five-Smoke Camp Fire after the old farmhouse in which Kitty lives because that house is still sometimes described in their locality as the house of the big chimney or the farm of the five smokes owing, no doubt, to the fact that in early days after the house was built about two hundred years ago, Kitty’s ancestors could afford five fires going together, while other families of the settlers had only one.”
“The ‘Five-Smoke Camp Fire’? Isn’t it a great name? A dandy name!” burst from one and another of the crescent-group applaudingly.
“It is. And as there’s no smoke without fire, let us hope that it will kindle a five-pointed blaze in the world in honor of Wohelo: Work, Health, Love. Now, I’ll read you Kitty’s letter!
“You see, she says that they, the members of this new Camp Fire circle, have just received their Charter from Headquarters,” added the Guardian softly when the reading was finished. “It seems to me that it would draw us near to them, to our Camp Fire Sisters everywhere, if we were to unite in repeating the beautiful words of that Charter which hangs, framed, upon our wall.”
“Yes! Oh, yes! Let us!” One girlish face after another was uplifted to a glint of framed glass above them through which the leaping flame of their Council Fire picked out, here and there, a colored capital.