Carried beyond himself–perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit–he actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, when–when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!
By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers a boiling kettle.
“Fegs! ’twas like to scald somebody wi’ its daffy simmer,” he explained apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur, used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills–so like, in many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed loch.
“My certy! but ’twas pretty to see yon merle, though!” he murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. “Fine it minded me, ma’am, o’ the time when I was a boy, huntin’ like a nickum for the nests o’ mavis an’ merle–blackbird an’ thrush–when I’d rise ‘wi’ lark an’ light!’ Fegs!” Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, “yon was a thing to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don’t know but I was feelin’ like the last o’ pea-time; an’–an’, noo, I’m a green pea again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory,” added Andrew, the true-penny, under his breath.
“Yes–yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!” complained Una, aggrieved. “Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?” she cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.
“My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud–Studley–Studart they nickname him in camp–I don’t know why,” was the fluttering response.
“A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!” supplied the Guardian, now busily frying flapjacks. “Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband’s troop, he’s the lion-heart,” laughingly. “So I understand!”
“Yes, oh! yes, but he’s so-o nice, with it,” cooed the merle’s brown-eyed “mate.” “He has never–oh! never–squeezed me out of anything, just because I was a girl; always said that two–two–could hunt together and make good headway!” softly.
“And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest quest of all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side by side! Girls! Dear–girls!” The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze now with more than the firelight’s glow, as she tossed her browned cakes on to a platter. “Dear girls! In the new, the wider future before us–soon to confront all of you–let us bring to it our Camp Fire hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle’s breath, the ‘pep’ of the outdoor dawn–tenderness of the twilight, when we feel that God is near!... And now–and now! let us sing our grace, not for this food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us–the glorious manna of opportunity.”
“If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but if unmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!”