Blue Robin, the Girl Pioneer

by Rena I. Halsey

Barbara, notwithstanding her weighty nickname of the Encyclopedia, was agile, and lost no time in flying after her, urged to speed by the girls. Although inclined to poke fun sometimes at Barbara for her absent-mindedness and love of books, the girls were her firm friends. They loved her for her kindly heart and sincere efforts to help others.

There was a shout of victory when it was seen that the Encyclopedia had captured her head-gear, and they were all clapping vociferously when an automobile rounded the bend in the road. The car turned out to be the doctor’s, whose chauffeur had promised to meet him near the cross-roads as he had to be in his office by five that afternoon.

The doctor quickly assisted Mrs. Morrow into the car as she had decided to ride, and then stood and waited while the Pioneers—two of whom had been invited to join their Director—urged Kitty with her iron pot, and the Flower with her griddle to accept the invitation.

The girls finally consented, and with many waves of the hands to the pedestrians, and a loud honk, honk, the car glided down the road and out of sight.

Helen, Nathalie, and Edith, as they lived near one another, bade their mates good-by, and, as they had decided to take a short cut home, turned down a side path. As they strolled slowly along a road running by a low stone wall hedging a pasture, where a brook twisted like a silver cord in the undulating grass, Edith asked her companions if they did not want to walk to the Bluff, where they would have a fine view of the bay in the distance.

“Oh, yes,” assented Helen, “it is a lovely view, Nathalie, and will only be a step out of the way if we go by the brook.”

Nathalie, although feeling somewhat tired, was anxious to visit the Bluff, and a minute later the three girls climbed the stone barricade and were keeping pace with the brook’s windings as it leaped boisterously over a bed of stones, or crept lingeringly, with murmuring ripples, between grass-fringed banks.

Presently they wandered into the shade of the trees, where, to Nathalie’s surprise, she found the old brook bed. Instead of being earth and stones, however, it was green and flower-starred, overshadowed by weeping willows and silver birches, their interlaced tops bending low as if seeking their old-time friend with its murmuring song.

Lulled by the mossy dell and the fragrance of the woodland posies, the girls loitered, and did not realize that the afternoon was waning until they reached the Bluff. They raced to the top, where Nathalie’s joy at being the fleetest was forgotten, as with stilled eyes she gazed upon the fertile strip of valley below, its green specked by tiny white cottages and washed by the waters of the bay that shone in the glow of the setting sun like a sheet of brass.

The air was becoming chilled by the mist that was hovering in the distance, and they turned and quickly made their way back to the road. Whereupon, Edith insisted that they take the summit road, leading over a small hill at one end of the town, which she declared would save time.