They had brought their lunches!
Instantly the girls fell to welcoming the excursionists, but the children so quickly melted into the scenery that only by the promptest of efforts were the Bobbies able to reclaim the merest fringe of the disorganized parade. How those children ran and stumbled and fell over friendly bushes!
How they called and shouted! Could there really be hidden in the camp grounds all the treasures now being simultaneously announced?
“Look-it! I’ve got a black-berry!”
“I’ve got a chestnut!” (It was a last year’s acorn.)
“I—found—a—mush—a—room!” This last cry reached the ears of Corene, who quickly set after the mushroom hunters. There should be no sudden deaths from toad-stool poisoning at Camp Comalong.
Cleo and Grace had captured a girl with her chubby little brother. On account of the brother and his chubbiness they were more easily overtaken than the others. Louise and Isabel were trying to keep a party of four from wading in the spring, while Julia was panic-stricken at the food famine outlook. Miss Mackin talked to the strange leader, who proved to be Miss Rachel Brooks, of the Beacon Mission Settlement.
“I shouldn’t have come upon you this way for the world,” Miss Brooks insisted. “But I have been promising my children a picnic all summer, and they have to work so hard—those little girls. Vacation usually means harder work for such as they, for when school is dismissed the home work begins,” she declared, with a show of indignation.
“That’s quite true,” agreed Miss Mackin, “and I often think it is a pity that our child-labor laws do not include a continuous home survey. But again: what about the tired mothers these little daughters help?”
“True, true; just a circle of trouble for them, no matter how we try to help. So when I heard that a troop of Girl Scouts were going to give up their camp for city children——”