To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored; it also served as a springboard for diving.
Built by girl-carpenters themselves–with a little masculine help–presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, for the June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian thought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life, which ever in “glorifying Work” seeks Beauty!
The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noble reflection in the green-lipped Bowl,–benevolently promising, indeed, a day hot for the season, as well as radiant.
“Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead,” said Tanpa musingly. “I think you can go in–for a short swim, any way.”
“Notify me–notify me if you see me drowning–for I can’t hear the voice of doom through my bathing cap!” laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later, in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, to where the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblem on the breast of her blue bathing suit.
“Oh! she’s in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I–I do-o now,” shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowl had undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. “Aren’t you coming, Thrush?” she cried. “Aren’t you coming in, Jessie?”
“I can’t leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversary present–though they went about presenting him in a queer way,” was the fostering answer.
The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys had been before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spray creaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lake itself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of these daring June bathers.
“Now–now who wants to dress and come out in the boats for a study of pond-life under the microscope?” cried the Guardian.
“Whoo! Whoo! That–that’s a bait to which the fish always rise,” cried one and another, eagerly splashing ashore blue of brow and covered with gooseflesh, yet loath to admit that on this the feathered Santa Claus’ gift of a prematurely perfect June day the creamy Bowl was still too emphatically a cooler.