Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped–a bevy of shivers–fleeing for warmth and the shelter of the bungalow.
“Oo-oo-oo! I’ve never been in bathing so early in the year before,” shook out Pemrose, to whom the experience–the lingering chill of this mountain Bowl many hundred feet above sea-level–was rather too much of a weak parody upon her last freshwater ducking.
“Oh! you’ll soon warm up. Come, hurry and dress! It’s no end of fun studying water-snails and egg-boats–gnats’ funny egg-boats–under a microscope, with the Scoutmaster,” encouraged Tomoke, in everyday life Ina Atwood, blue as her lightning namesake, and rather hankering after the warmth of her pine-knot torch.
“Ye-es; and–and minnows–where every one of them is–is a chief Triton among the minnows!” laughed another girl, scrambling into her clothes. “Meaning no minnows, at all–all-ll Tritons!”
All Tritons, sure enough, rosy Tritons, brilliant now in the early summer, the breeding season, with wonderful colors, the males, especially.
Swimming about, near the surface, as the minnows usually do, the clear waters of the June Bowl became for the girls, looking, one by one through the large microscope over the boat’s side, a “vasty deep” in which leviathans played–fairy fish–seeing everything rose-color, painting themselves to ecstasy with the joys of mating, the joy of June.
“See–see they’re not all red–or partly so–s-such a lovely pinky-red, especially around the fins and head–that’s where they keep their pigment,” said Tanpa. “Some have colored themselves like goldfish; others are greenish–or lighter yellow.”
“Ha! While others, again, are gotten up as if for a minstrel show for their marriage–painted black, for the time being!” laughed her husband, the tall Scout Officer.
“Yes. That’s why we like, girls and boys, to come down to our camp early in the season–if only at intervals–because we watch the summer coming and can study the wonderful lake life as at no other time,” remarked the Guardian again, and then subsided into private life in the stern of the broad, red camp-skiff, scribbling something in verse form to be read at the White Birch celebration in the afternoon when land as well as lake was a-riot with young color, strewn with wild flowers for gay June to tread on.
“Oh! isn’t it the most wonderful–wonderful season? In the city we go camping too late. The freshness isn’t there.” Pem’s eyes were dim as she applied one to the lens of the microscope, to gaze once more at the painted Tritons; she was glad that in the freshness of the year it was–oh! so soon now–that the little Thunder Bird would momentarily color the skies and paint the World rose-colored in excitement over its demonstration–over the heights that could be reached–paving the way for the Triton of Tritons to come.