the queer little half-savage syllables, borrowed from the Creek
Indians, upon the lips of the chanting, dancing girls, to the coconut
hand-rattle wielded by Aponi, the Butterfly, most fairy-like of the
green dancers, as she led and led, in honor of the new _idlwissi_,
or tree-hair, the listening leaves--ethereal partners overhead.

[Illustration]

Containing little pebbles picked from the lake-side, with a stick
running through the painted coconut-shell for a handle, its gleeful
rattle fairly turned girls' heads with the joy of June.

"I think we'll have to ask you to repeat that dance to-night for the
benefit of the boys, your guests," said the Scoutmaster, who was
manipulating the phonograph. "Fairyland wouldn't be 'in it' with the
human leaves tripping in pink and gold and green and--no ordinary man
knows what!"

Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as "across the lake in golden
glory" the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating
pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging
feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep
cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping
among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a
dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts
in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel.

"Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party,"
said Toandoah's little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those
satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat
enthroned upon the sod of the cliff's brow, with two knights beside her,
Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose
parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green,
which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of
course entailed a nickname.

"You promised you'd dance the Lancers with me, although I'm only a
tenderfoot," said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone
upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin's, in
the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes
under inky lashes.

"Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their
Beehive when--when that dance comes off!" grumbled the fifteen-year-old
Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a
brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the young