“Why did she choose ‘Morning-Glory’ as her tribe name?” asked Mŭnkwŏn the Rainbow of Sesooā the Flame, as Rainbow and Flame, with girlish arms entwining, stood beneath the shelter of the Silver Twins, two kingly birch-trees, so identical in stature even to their topmost jeweled crowns of leaves flashing in the July sun, so alike in the silver symmetry of each fair limb as to be named the Twins.
These silver kings were one-hearted, too, in their benevolent purpose in life, which was to unite in casting a brotherly shade over a certain corner of the broad city playground, dotted with children from every clime, and incidentally to fan the flushed cheeks of the two girls directly beneath them, bound together by a girdling rainbow that played about their waists, woven by the sun’s shuttle amid the quivering birch-leaves, fit symbol of their binding Camp Fire sisterhood.
Sesooā’s eyes danced, lit by a tiny golden flame that uncurled itself in their demure hazel like a firefly alighting on a brown leaf. She caught her lower lip between the pretty incisors that decorated the front of her mouth as she scrutinized the semi-distant figure of a sixteen-year-old girl—perhaps nearer to seventeen—clad in a loose lavender smock to her knees, whence to her ankles there was a gleam of white skirt, with the most bewitching, frilled summer “Tam” of lavender, matching her smock, shielding her brown head, sheltering her face, like the hood of a flower. This floral figure leaned against the open door of a handsome automobile which was standing upon the playground avenue.
“I’m sure it’s beyond me to tell why Jessica Holley (Jessica Dee Holley; she always likes to bring the unusual little middle name in, because it was her mother’s, I suppose), why she chose Welatáwesit, which is the only Indian equivalent she could find for Morning-Glory—literally meaning ‘Climbing Plant’ or ‘Pretty Flower’ for her Camp Fire name. But I believe there’s a story attached to the choice, some ‘cunning’ little anecdote of her childhood. Wish I could ferret it out! She seems, always, to have been called ‘Glory,’ nearly as much as Jessica,” answered Sesooā racily, she who in every-day life bore no flaming cognomen, but was plain little, gay little, Sally Davenport, as full of quips and quirks, of lightning impulses and sudden turns as the wheeling firefly in her eyes.
“Goody! I’d like to hear the anecdote, too. The Morning-Glory name suits her so well that I thought she must have dreamed it—that it came to her in sleep—as I dreamed mine,” laughed the Rainbow, whose rightful name when she was not clad in a leather-fringed robe of khaki, in moccasins and head-band, and seated by a Council Fire, was Arline Champion. “But I call it absurd, meanly absurd, that if there’s any story about her and her name, we should not hear it, we who have named our Camp Fire (and it’s the best in the city, too, though I say it myself!), our whole group or tribe of fourteen girls, after her,” she went on with a stamp of her foot on the playground sod and with rainbowed emphasis; she was the shell-tinted, demurely shining kind of fifteen-year-old girl who unconsciously aims at carrying a rainbow in her pocket, to brighten the dull or tear-wet day.
“Oh! we didn’t exactly ‘name it after her,’” demurred Sally. “She happened to come here last winter to visit those rich girls, the Deerings, who are all fluff an’ stuff; that exactly describes them, Olive and Sybil——” There was the least little green tinge of the spitfire about Sesooā’s flame now as she shot a glance toward two girls seated in the waiting automobile together with an older woman, evidently chaperon to the band of girls. “Oh! I say, pinch me; I shouldn’t have said that, should I, seeing that they brought us here in their car? But ’twas the first time they ever did it, though my father is head-bookkeeper in their father’s office at the Works; and I’ll engage ’twas Morning-Glory—Jessica—who suggested it, as we all wanted to visit this playground where there are so many foreign children, to see them dance their folk dances,” she ran on, speech flitting away from its starting-point in the wake of her firefly dance, which vivaciously hovered from one object or group of objects to another.
Arline waited for it to alight again on Jessica, as it presently did.
“Well! as I was saying,” reverted Sally, “you remember how she came here last February just when we were beginning to organize our Camp Fire group, when we had secured Miss Darina Dewey as Guardian (I think she’s a love of a Guardian and I like her unusual first name, too, though some of the girls don’t!) but before we had applied for our Charter, when we were searching for a name for our new Camp Fire circle, raking over Indian names like leaves until—goodness! we seemed half-smothered in them.” Sally paused for breath, breathlessly smothered, indeed, by the sunlit torrent of her own words, which had a trick of inundating a listener.
“It was at our second meeting, I think, at Miss Dewey’s house,” she went on, “that Jessica came in, all snow an’ sparkle from her eyes to her toes, and introduced herself by showing a transfer card signed by the Guardian of a Camp Fire circle in a small town in Pennsylvania to which she had belonged, the Akiyuhapi Camp Fire.”
“The Are-you-happy Camp Fire! Sounds just like that!” put in Arline, rainbowed with mirthful memory. “Jessica told us that she had already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer and showed her silver fagot ring. But we were a little flabbergasted, weren’t we, when she sprang her Indian name on us, by which she had chosen to be known among Camp Fire circles: Welatáwesit; it sounded musical as she pronounced it, but it seemed a mouthful! She partly explained it (d’you remember?) by saying that when she was choosing her symbolic name—as all Camp Fire Girls do—she wanted, for a special reason which she kept to herself, to take that of a flower, Morning-Glory. And that Penobscot Indian word was the nearest she could get to it, the morning-glory not being originally a native plant.”