gure in forest green--last sylvan word in Camp Fire
uniforms which she was trying on--she hung there, poised upon an inner
pinnacle, while sunbeams racing down the whitewash did obeisance before
her, while spectroscope, lathe and delicate balances, brilliant
reflectors, offered her a brazen crown.

"Well--well, it's coming to you, Pem--you sprite." Her father shot a
sidelong glance at the nixie green as he fitted another little rocket
into its groove in the larger one's interior, where the touch of a
mechanical appliance, like the trigger of a gun, in the Thunder Bird's
tail, would ignite it in flight. "You alone, girl as you are, know the
full secret of the Thunder Bird, as you romantically call it, the
principle on which I am working, child--in so far as you can understand
it--in creating this model rocket for experiments and the master
sky-rocket, the full-fledged Thunder Bird, later, to soar even to the
moon itself--Mars, too, maybe--you alone know and you have kept it dark.
You've plugged like a boy at your elementary physics in high school,
so's to be _able_ to understand and sympathize--you've lived up to
the name I gave you--"

"My chowchow name!" interjected the girl, winking slily.

"Well! it is a mixture." Her father echoed her chuckle. "But I guess
you've been son and daughter both, you good little pal--you sprite of
the lab."

"Oh! Toandoah--oh! Daddy-man--I'm so glad."

Here there was a little laboratory explosion, a rocket of feeling fired
off, as the owner of that hybrid name, Pemrose, came down from her
pinnacle and, perching upon a low tool-chest at the inventor's side,
took the humbler place she loved,--fellow of her father's heart.

"I--I used to wish I was all boy until I became a Camp Fire Girl; that
bettered the betty element a little," she confided, the spice of her
mixed cognomen floating in her eye.

It was a joke with her, that chowchow name--original mixture--and how
she came by it.

Her father, Professor Guy Noel Lorry, Fellow of Nevil
University,--Toandoah, the inventor, she called him,--wearing his
symbol, a saw-toothed triangle, embroidered with her own upon her
ceremonial dress--had at one time almost prayed for a son, a boy who
might help him to realize the dream, even then taking hold upon his
heart, of conquering not the air alone but space--zero space, in which
it was thought nothing could travel--so that old Earth might reach out
to her sister planets.

He planned to cal