ming festival: the swimming structure, naevely composed of two
great barrels, boarded over, with a broad plank, as a bridge, running
out ashore.

To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored;
it also served as a springboard for diving.

Built by girl-carpenters themselves--with a little masculine
help--presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, for
the June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian
thought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life,
which ever in "glorifying Work" seeks Beauty!

The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noble
reflection in the green-lipped Bowl,--benevolently promising, indeed, a
day hot for the season, as well as radiant.

"Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead," said Tanpa musingly. "I
think you can go in--for a short swim, any way."

"Notify me--notify me if you see me drowning--for I can't hear the voice
of doom through my bathing cap!" laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later,
in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, to
where the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblem
on the breast of her blue bathing suit.

"Oh! she's in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I--I do-o
now," shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowl
had undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. "Aren't you coming,
Thrush?" she cried. "Aren't you coming in, Jessie?"

"I can't leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversary
present--though they went about presenting him in a queer way," was the
fostering answer.

The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys had
been before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spray
creaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lake
itself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of these
daring June bathers.

"Now--now who wants to dress and come out in the boats for a study of
pond-life under the microscope?" cried the Guardian.

"Whoo! Whoo! That--that's a bait to which the fish always rise," cried
one and another, eagerly splashing ashore blue of brow and covered with
gooseflesh, yet loath to admit that on this the feathered Santa Claus'
gift of a prematurely perfect June day the creamy Bowl was still too
emphatically a cooler.

Up the rude sod steps of the cliff they trooped--a bevy of
shiv