slender tree
choir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft--aloft to
Heaven.

"So you're not only gifted as a 'merle', you sing as a girl, too!" said
Pemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in her
green breast-pocket. "You must love birds very much in order to imitate
a thrush-song like that."

"Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brown
bird of the woods; so I thought it was 'up to me' to learn to converse
with my kind!" was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. "My brother Stud and
I have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have just
arrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp."

"Here--here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp for
boys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded shores of The
Bowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills," put in Tanpa, an
air-drawn picture in her glowing tones. "There are two big bungalows, a
couple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Of
course, we can't occupy them all the time, at present, not until school
is closed, but we constantly go out there over night--to watch the
summer coming--and for week-ends."

"Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at any
other season of the year," put in one of the older girls, an
Assistant-Guardian. "And we can always keep warm, you know, even if
there is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us."

"Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches--the
stocking, I mean--when the holes are just haggles!" The eyebrows of a
fair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes of
merriment. "But we do--do have such fun at our Get Togethers--our
picnics and parties," went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi the
Butterfly of the mountain group.

"Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soon
now--one the day after to-morrow--Saturday--a picnic at Snowbird Cave,
to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of the
river, the blue Housatonic."

This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouths
together.

"Oh! the Housatonic--blue--Hous-a-tonic!" Pemrose bent demurely over her
flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her view
of it from the Devil's Chair. "And what about the second Get
Together--when is that to be?" she asked.

"A week from Saturday: _J