“We want to get a chance at the folk-dances, too,” they remonstrated, very reasonably. Indeed, Louise got up and made a moving speech, alluding to her pressing need of folk-dances, and her slender chance of being able to do them while she played her instrument.
“Here I am,” she said pathetically, “twice as plump as anybody else in camp. I need folk-dances more than anybody here does. And I’ve spent this whole blessed evening plunking a banjo while other people got thin, people that were thin already! It may be good for my moral character, but, girls”—Louise’s voice dropped tragically—“it’s ruining yours!”
They all agreed that something should be done.
Mrs. Bryan was entirely willing to go on pounding her Indian drum indefinitely, but the girls did not think it would be good for their moral characters to let her, either. So they held a business meeting on the spot, which happened to be the large level place they used for dancing ground; and decided to buy a phonograph.
“I think we have catalogues of them at home,” said Dorothy Gray. “Shall I write and have them sent on?”
The girls considered that for awhile, but they finally decided not to. Everyone wanted a voice in choosing the phonograph, or at least in deciding on what kind of a phonograph they were to have.
“But we don’t want to pay the full price for it,” said Helen wisely. “What we ought to do is to advertise in the Press in the village. It’s the country paper. Look at the market Win created for kittens——”
But here Winona sprang for her, and they rolled over on the leaves, and the meeting ended in a frolic.
However, they all liked Helen’s idea, and two Blue Birds were sent off to the Press with an advertisement for a second-hand phonograph or victrola in good condition. Next day two other Blue Birds went after the answers. There were three.
One offered a fine music-box in good condition, which had never been used since the owner’s wife died twenty years ago. He lived on the Northtown Pike (which nobody present had ever heard of), about seventeen miles from the village. The music-box played six tunes and was an heirloom, having belonged to his mother, but the farmer on the Northtown Pike would part with it for twenty-five dollars for he wanted another Holstein cow and this would pay for part of her.