“In your house,” repeated Veve. “But they are idle.”
“How can we find those brownies?”
“I’ll tell you how to find one of them,” said Veve, the owl. “Go to the pool in the woods and turn yourself around three times, saying this charm:
“Twist me and turn me and show me the elf,
I looked in the water and saw—”
“MYSELF,” shouted the other girls in the Rosedale Brownie troop.
“Oh, you’re getting ahead of the story!” Veve protested. “Mary didn’t learn that she was the Brownie until a long while later.”
“We all know what happened,” said Jane impatiently. “The children started doing the work at home, making the old couple think they were the brownies. Then one day they were discovered.”
“Even so, they kept on helping,” Connie contributed. “And everyone said the children were a blessing, not a burden.”
“That’s a bob-tailed version of Mrs. Julianna Horatia Ewing’s lovely story,” Miss Gordon laughed. “More than anything else, it embodies the ideals of our organization.”