At about half-past seven, people began coming and I could see that we were going to have a big house, I mean a big car. First an automobile full of people arrived and then a lot more who had walked from Skiddyunk. Then a couple more automobiles came and pretty soon there were a half a dozen of them parked around the car, and the seats inside the car were full. Westy stood on the platform collecting ten cents from each one and letting them through, past the screen. Oh, boy, there was some crowd.
Pretty soon the store man came over and said that as long as the weather was so warm, it would be a good idea to open the car windows and have standing room outside. So he gave us some boxes and barrels and things to put outside the windows for people to stand on. All the people out there paid their ten cents just the same and they laughed and said it was a lot of fun. Some of them were summer people, I guess; holdovers. The girls from Camp Smile Awhile came over in two canoes and a rowboat.
When there wasn't space for another head to stick through a window, I got up in front of the screen and made a speech. This is what I said:
"Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for coming to see our show, and we hope you'll like it. I guess maybe I ought to tell you about Temple Camp, then you'll understand the pictures better.
"Temple Camp is where lots of scouts go in the summer. It's near the Hudson. Maybe you've heard about all the different things that scouts learn how to do. So these pictures will show you some of those things.
"Some of the things are hard, but some of them are easy, like eating and things like that. Especially desserts. So now the show will begin."
First we flashed the sentence that is in the handbook:
A SCOUT IS HANDY AND USEFUL
and then came the picture of Pee-wee with a big white apron on, standing in front of the stove in the cooking shack, stirring a big boiler full of soup. I heard one of the girls say, "Oh, isn't he simply too cute for anything!" Then we flashed another sentence that said: