There was an ice-house connected with their cottage, and ice cream was to be permitted on Sundays, and lemonade at pleasure.
“But where are the lemons?” said Mary, flying about in everybody’s way.
“Oh, we shall buy fresh lemons every morning of our grocer who comes to our door,” said Lucy grandly. “What I want to know is, if my hammock was packed?—Children, did you see three hammocks in that push-cart?—Boys, I hope you’ll hang up those hammocks before we get there! Don’t go racing now and spilling out things!—There, I don’t believe anybody thought to put in that spider,” added she anxiously, as the five girls had bidden good-by to their families in the cool of the morning, and were walking in a gay procession toward their house in the country.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven.”
Old Bluff was a steep, though not very high mountain on the Canada side, and if it is not gone, it stands there yet, hanging defiantly over the blue brook called the river Dee, and throwing its huge shadow from shore to shore.
Old Bluff is a stern, bareheaded peak, and few are the flowers that dare show their faces near it. It is chiefly the hardy wintergreen and disconsolate little sprigs of pine and spruce which huddle together along its sides.
At the foot of this famous bluff, on the New York side, stood General Townsend’s old-fashioned farm-house, a story and a half high, with a white picket fence around it, and a red barn at one side. The house many years ago had been white; and the panes of glass in the windows were not only very small, but weather-stained and streaked with rainbow hues. London Pride or “Bouncing Bet” grew near the broad front door-stone, together with a few bunches of southernwood, which Dr. Gray thought had a finer odor than any geranium. The front yard was grassy, and the fence lined with roses of various sorts.
It was the first summer for years that this pleasant old place had been vacant, and now it might be applied for any day; but meanwhile the five girls, called “the quintette,” and the three attendant cavaliers, called “the trio,” were welcome to rusticate in it, and call it a “camp” if they chose.
After the furniture was set up, and there had been a reasonable amount of play at hide and seek in the barn, and the first supper had been eaten—the tablecloth proving to be too small for the table—Mary went to one of the front “rainbow-windows” to watch for Preston.