.
She handed the wrapping-paper and bag to Rob, saying if that was not
enough she would scratch the label off the can of evaporated cream.

Carefully holding his hat over the pile of twigs to shield it from the
wind, Rob applied a match to the paper. It blazed up and caught the
wood at once, and in a few moments a comfortable fire was crackling in
front of them. Back in the cavelike hollow, under the rocks, the boys
found a big, dry log, which other campers had put there for a seat. They
rolled it forward toward the fire. Some flat stones were soon heated for
the girls to put their feet on, and, warmed and rested, they began to
investigate the contents of the baskets.

"Oh, Rob!" groaned Lloyd. "What a lunch you did pick up for a wintah
day! These slabs of cold pumpkin pie would freeze the teeth of a polah
beah, and there's nothing else but pickles and cheese and apples and raw
eggs."

"That's fine!" exclaimed Allison. "We can roast the eggs in the ashes,
and I've brought bacon to broil over the fire on switches. And here's
crackers and gingersnaps and salmon--"

"And peanuts," added Kitty, "don't forget them. Or the fudge. We will
have that ready in a little while."

"Now what could be jollier than this?" cried Gay, as she took the long,
pointed switch that Rob cut for her, and held a piece of bacon over the
fire to broil. "It's a thousand times nicer than a picnic in the summer,
when you get so hot, and the mosquitoes and redbugs and spiders swarm
all over you."

Lloyd, with a sigh of relief, saw that Rob was "acting natural" at last,
and he and Gay were showing off to mutual advantage. She was enjoying
the novel experience so fully that she was in her brightest spirits, and
he was talking to her with the familiar ease with which he talked to
Lloyd and Betty, even scolding her with brotherly frankness when she
dripped bacon grease around too promiscuously.

The eggs were saltless, the bacon smoked and black, because, held in the
flame as often as against the embers, nearly every piece caught fire and
had to be blown out. Smoke blew in their eyes, and the snow fell thicker
and thicker. But, with their feet on the hot stones, their backs to the
sheltering ledge of rocks, and the fire crackling in front of them, they
sang and laughed and ate with a zest which no summer picnic could have
inspired.

No one had remembered to bring a pail for water, and rather than tramp
over another hill to a distant spring, they