CHAPTER X
Camp Fire Sisters
Never was a diversion more welcome!
| “We’re on the map, R-ready to prove it with snap!” |
Snap was in the very sunset as the evening breeze learned the song.
As for the inventor’s daughter, her joyous relief was now a hop and now a dance, anon a pine-caught hullabaloo, as she gleefully turned her back upon the Devil’s Chair and nickum memories–her face to the glowing sun of sisterhood.
“Camp Fire sisters! Camp Fire sisters! Was ever such luck?” she cried. “Oh! come, let’s find them–let’s join them.”
“Oh–let us!” assented Una, her excitement, too, running like wildfire through the wood.
And, presently, the two city girls, wafting themselves airily over bowlders, threading their way in and out among pigmy pines, with here and there a needled patriarch among them, came upon a forest scene that might well have wakened Queen Mab from her sleep in a cobweb net and made her think that some, at least, of the fairy dreams with which she inspired mortals had come true.
A dozen, and more, of sylvan figures, the green tassels of their Tam-o’-shanters waving like the tasseled green of the cinnamon fern flitted busily in and out among their passive brothers, the trees, not pines here, but a few beautiful stripling birches planted in a sunny spot.
To these white-stemmed saplings, tall and taper-like, some of the nymphs, maidens from thirteen to seventeen, were playing fairy godmother, affixing to their slender trunks placards proclaiming the exaction of dire forfeits from any wanton human churl found guilty of mutilating a silver birch tree, stripping it even of an inch of tender skin, thus entailing upon it decay and death.