will be a handsome one. Isn't that fine?"

"Oh, if we could only win it!" cried Jess, clasping her hands.

"You've got about as much chance of winning over Keyport as I have of
flying," said Hester Grimes.

"If goodness is necessary to your wearing wings, Hester, I am afraid you
really haven't much chance," said one of the seniors, sweetly, and there
was a little giggle of approval from the younger girls.

"It is a sure thing that we can't win with our old tub," agreed Laura,
nodding a thoughtful head.

"Pah!" snapped Hester. "You girls in that eight couldn't win anyway."

"I don't know why you say that, Hester," complained Nellie Agnew, who
pulled Number 15 in the eight-oared shell. "We do our very best."

"That's what I say," laughed the Grimes girl. "And your 'very best' is
about as slow as anything on the lake."

"Let me tell you that doesn't sound very loyal to the school, Miss,"
spoke up another senior.

"And who's to teach _me_ how to talk?" demanded Hester, tossing her
head. "I am not asking you, Miss."

"Order, please!" commanded Laura, firmly. "It is not a question of how
badly or how well the eight rows. Not just now. We have received a
notice of this prize. We must respond properly to the secretary of the
Luna Club."

This item was disposed of; but Laura had another thing connected with it
on her mind.

"It is quite true," she said, "that with the old shell we have been
rowing in, it will be perfectly impossible for our eight to win the
race. We are all agreed on that?"

"And all the sane ones are agreed that you couldn't win in _any_ boat,"
declared Hester, in her very meanest way.

"Now, I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Hessie," complained Nellie
Agnew.

"And it isn't so, either!" exclaimed Jess Morse.

"Give us a good shell and we'll show you," said Dorothy Lockwood.

"That is what we need," agreed her twin.

"Of course we can win under any decent circumstances," said Laura, "now
that we have Bobby Hargrew to be coxswain again."

Hester was silenced for the time. "Bobby," or Clara Hargrew, had been in
difficulties with the school authorities a few weeks before, and had
been debarred from all the after-hour athletics--and Hester Grimes had
been partly to blame for Bobby's trouble.

"The point of the whole matter is," said Celia Prime, one of the older
girls, who was on the point of graduating from Central High, "that the
eight need and must have a new shell. Our present boat is