It’s not even snakes nor ’squitoes,
It’s the—sleeping out—at—night.
Around the waning camp fire the wail of a parody rang, voicing or burlesquing the sentiments of a dozen Camp Fire Girls.
The other half dozen were loftily silent. They were seasoned campers—or supposed they were. They had dwelt much upon the hike on the bliss of the poncho-bed, with a mattress of pine or spruce boughs—the bliss that never clung to wall or bedstead of a paper-hung room.
rang the murmur, echoing, dreamy.
“It’s not the stars for big candle tonight; it’s the moon, a full, bright moon; there she’s rising now,” said a seventeen-year-old girl, Madeline Fitch. “How about a ring concert?”
“We’re too far from any strong sending station here, I think, to pick up anything by radio—even a murmur, with such a tiny set,” said Pemrose Lorry. “But I’ll try it if you like. Here, Unie,” to her girl chum, “you put the ring on; I’ll play ‘ground’—sink my heel into the edge of the spring—there. But, heavens! you mustn’t pickle the crystal,” she was gasping deliriously, a moment later, interposing a quick palm to catch the little tear of homesickness and novelty—swollen, perhaps by the remembrance of strange sensations experienced when last she had “listened in” on the ring—which came trickling down Una’s pretty nose.
“Father says a drop of water, a horrid little teardrop, would spoil even a galena crystal—and much more this new one. I have to be as careful of it,” the inventor’s daughter caught her breath, “as he is with some of his priceless laboratory treasures, his rare quartz tuning forks, for instance, that give the purest pitch of any sound.... Oh! I wish we were at camp now—so that I really, might talk with him, by radio—fancy holding a wireless ‘hamfest’,—that’s the word, not a ‘gabfest’—with him—a hundred miles off!”
The longing tear was in Pemrose’s eye now, a flashing droplet, but there was no fear of its pickling the sensitive “radio soul”, the new crystal; instantly dashed away it was as she hurried to loop her aërial round a distant tree—with a word to one and another of the girls to watch the tip of Una’s nose.
But nothing could be picked up from the air with the ring to-night, save occasionally a “dying tick”, as its owner put it, the swooning ghost of dot and dash, so faint, so very faint—remotely random—that it seemed to come from the other side of the world—or from the moon, itself, untranslatable signaling—and the experiment was abandoned in favor of turning in early.