upon her small
face, with a luminous quality added--opened a volunteering palm.

In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic
whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent
piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance
between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a
fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody
in the breast of the thrush as to draw--actually draw--the hermit
himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly,
a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer--the mate, who had answered him.

"Romeo and Juliet!" laughed the Guardian. "Such a dear little feathered
Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold--and a fairy oboe in his breast!
Juliet--" she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden--"Juliet
answering from her balcony, this mound!"

"Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him
with!" breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. "No doubt he's
saying to himself: 'Shucks! Where's that hermit--or hermitess--'"
merrily, "'with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?'"

"Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?" pleaded the visitors together. "It's
won-der-ful! We'll be as still--as still as a nun's chapel!"

And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of
speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which
answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:

"the song complete,
With such a wealth of melody sweet,
As never the organ pipe could blow
And never musician think or know!"

Carried beyond himself--perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit--he
actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight,
when--when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!

By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length
from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers
a boiling kettle.

"Fegs! 'twas like to scald somebody wi' its daffy simmer," he explained
apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur,
used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills--so like, in
many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the
Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed
loch.

"My certy! but 'twas pretty to see yon _merle_, though!" he
murmured, having restored the ket