“Yes, and it was at that very meeting, after we had welcomed Jessica with open arms as a Camp Fire Sister”—thus Sally again took up the fascinating thread of reminiscence—“that when each girl had told her symbolic name, Indian or otherwise, and how she came to choose it to express some special wish or aim, that we fell back upon digging for one for the new Camp Fire itself, the new circle or tribe. And then, don’t you remember”—Sesooā’s voice rose to a pitch of excitement—“how Betty Ayres, little fair-haired Betty, who’s so enthusiastic and about as big as a minute—she’s just four feet, five inches and a half——”
“My! but your minutes do stretch—like elastic,” put in Arline, with a rallying elbow poke.
“Humph! Piffle! Betty jumped up suddenly as if she saw a vision, with an idea swelling up so big in her that she seemed to grow two inches on the strength of it. ‘Girls!’ she cried, ‘I’m just tired of browsing among Indian dictionaries, searching for a novel name for our new Camp Fire circle. Why don’t we call it, right away, the Morning-Glory Camp Fire? There’s a name that will reflect glory on us!’ said little Betty, half sobbing and half shining. ‘It suggests so much—so much that I can’t just put into words of——’”
“‘Of the Morning of Life, the Glory of Girlhood—and vice versa—isn’t that what you mean, Betty dear?’ said our Guardian, helping her out!” This reminiscent contribution came from Arline. “And then Miss Dewey went on to say how she thought herself that it would be a glorious name for us who are Daughters of the Sun, so to speak, having the Sun as our general symbol. So the Morning-Glory Camp Fire we are! And when we camp out this summer upon the Sugarloaf Peninsula where the sand-dunes are white as snow, we’re going to call our great, ramshackle wooden shanty, with one side quite open to the airs of heaven, Camp Morning-Glory. So much glory that we shan’t know ourselves, eh? But all this”—slowly—“doesn’t bring us one little bit nearer to answering the question which I asked you at first, why our Glory-girl, Jessica, chose her symbolic name at the beginning. Since it put so much into our heads we’ve got a right to know all about it!” with another laughing stamp upon the playground grass. “I can’t bear mystery; if there’s a secret as big as my thumb, even if it’s about nothing or next to nothing, I want to know it.”
“Oh, mystery—I love mystery! Bubbling mystery!” Sesooā rose on tiptoe under the Silver Twins, looking rather like a Baltimore oriole, that vivid flame-bird, for she, too, wore the latest thing in girlish smock frocks of a dainty peach-color very closely related to orange, shirred or smocked with black by her own clever little fingers that had fashioned the garment, too, the which had won her a green honor-bead to string upon the Camp Fire Girl’s necklace that she wore on ceremonial occasions.
Those fingers had draped the little orange Tam O’Shanter, as well, which covered her crisp, dark hair, a masterpiece of head-gear more jaunty, less hood-like than that of the flower-like figure leaning against the auto’s side to which the wheeling firefly of her glance now turned.
“Oh, bubbles! I’m going right over now to ask her why she chose her Morning-Glory name and symbol,” she went on, each word a tinted bubble of laughing curiosity painting itself upon the sunshine. “Absurd, but I am! If there’s any foolish little child-story woven in with the choice, this is the very time and place to hear it, here on the public playground, with all those children—such funny, foreign-looking tots most of them!—dancing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel!’ Pouf! I feel like dancing with them.”
And the human oriole flitting forth from the friendly shade of the Twins fluttered her shirred plumage in a gleeful pas seul upon the playground grass, where the sun-glare transformed her into an orange flame, while her ears, attuned to all merry sounds, drank in the shrill music of five-and-thirty children’s voices (the number ought to have been even, but in that gleeful chorus there was one silent throat), six dancing sets, shouting with a strange babel of foreign accents, to the accompaniment of their stamping feet, the old nonsense-rhyme of the sixteenth century:
“Half a pound of twopenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle,