y, a wading party, it was,
just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic--was a blaze of
color.

But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of
May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a
statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of
an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,--the sheaf of mayflowers
within his arm.

"Oh! how boys--big boys--do revel in color. A girl--any girl I ever
knew--is demure in her taste beside them," murmured the Camp Fire
Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.

"Pshaw! I think it's hor-rid. So flashy!" snapped Pemrose; Jack at a
Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her
eyes.

"Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He'd have a grosbeak 'skun a
mile'!" gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a
virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by
merit badge and service stripe.

"'Grosbeak!' Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color--why! it
paints the landscape," came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch
Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was
not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.

"Maybe 'twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them
there," put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. "They
certainly are a perfect 'scream', those big boys," her eyes merrily
following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.

"Humph! they'd have to 'go some' to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,"
remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. "The
biggest bonfire on earth wouldn't half dry the cave-tears there."

"Yes, that's the den of the Doleful Dumps--their diggings!" laughed a
younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling
eyes. "Bats--bats as big as saucers--no, soup-plates! And, far in--far
in--the sound of running water, like a weak wind!"

"Running water! Invisible running water! A--weak--wind! Oh-h! do let us
hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven't we?" The
gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem's heart as her
dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, "warbling" amid
its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil's
Chair. "But, goody! I hope we _won't_ run across him there--Jack at
a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!" She bit the th