sland_ since you and Ralph
rescued him seems to have been one gay and festive experience for a
Boston bull pup."

"It surely has," concurred Polly. "Snap says he's just wise to
everything, and did you ever see anything so absurd as those clown
tricks the jackies taught him?"

"I think you are all perfectly wonderful people, dogs and horses
included," was Rosalie's climax of eulogy, if rather peculiar and
comprehensive.

"Well, we had one royal good time and we are not likely to forget it
either. Peggy, weren't you petrified when you struck 'eight bells' at
the hop, for the death of the old year? Goodness, when those lights
began to go out, and everybody stopped dancing I felt so queer. And when
'taps' sounded little shivery creeps went all up and down my spine, and
you struck eight bells so beautifully! But reveille drove me almost
crazy. When the lights flashed on again I didn't know whether I wanted
to laugh or cry I was so nervous," was Natalie's reminiscence.

"It was the most solemn thing I ever heard and the most beautiful," said
Marjorie softly. "It made me homesick, and yet home doesn't mean
anything to me; this is the only one I have known since I was eight
years old."

"Eight years in one place and a school at that!" cried Juno. "Why, I
should have done something desperate long before four had passed. Girls,
think of being in a school eight years." Juno's tone implied the horrors
of the Bastile.

"If you had no other, what could you do?" Marjorie's question was asked
with a smile which was sadder than tears could have been.

Juno shrugged her shoulders, but Polly slipped over to Marjorie's side
and with one of Polly's irresistible little mannerisms, laid her arm
across her shoulder, as hundreds of times the boys in Bancroft
demonstrate their good fellowship for each other. Another girl would
probably have kissed her. Polly was not given to kisses. Then she asked:

"Won't your father come East this spring for commencement? You said you
hoped he would.

"I've hoped so every spring, but when he writes he says it takes four
whole months to reach Washington from that awful place in the Klondyke.
I wish he had never heard of it."

"I'm so glad you went to Severndale with us. We must never let her be
lonely or homesick again, Peggy."

"Not while Severndale has a spare hammock," nodded Peggy.

Marjorie was more or less of a mystery to most of the girls, but the
greatest of all to Mrs. Vincent to whom s