to
be one of you."

They sat a long time that evening, talking and exchanging ideas, for
there was something nearly bewitching in the fire and the view and the
friendship.

CHAPTER IV

Willis Becomes Interested in Gold Mines

The next four weeks passed by very slowly to Willis. Mr. Allen had
gone to the annual summer camp with a large number of the Association
boys. It was a State encampment, held in that very odd and interesting
part of the second range known as Cathedral Park. Willis had been very
anxious to go, for he knew it would be a very new and profitable
experience for him. Mr. Allen had asked him to go as a Leader, to have
charge of one tent of seven boys. He had never been to a camp of any
kind, to say nothing of a mountain camp, so it was a great disappointment
to him when his mother had told him that he had better not go this time.
His aunt had grown worse as the hot weather came on, and his mother
explained that she could not do without him in case his aunt should pass
away.

He understood perfectly and knew that his mother's request was
reasonable, so had contented himself by offering to help out at the
Association in Mr. Allen's absence. He was anxious to give something
in return for all Mr. Allen was giving him. Then, too, it gave him an
opportunity to watch the development of a good many of the cocoons and
chrysalides that the nature study club had placed in glasses in a window
of the reading room.

He had been making sketches of the development of several butterflies.
This kind of work he dearly loved. He would spend hours, sometimes,
watching a delicate insect emerge from its cocoon and slowly dry its
dainty, crumpled wings until it was able to fly.

One day he sat sketching an immense Ichneumon fly that had just emerged
from a Tawny Admiral chrysalis.

"You can't always tell," he was saying to the little group that were
watching him. "Nature fools you sometimes. Mr. Caterpillar, who built
that clean, cozy little house, and he was a fine, big, healthy fellow,
too, expected to be somebody one of these days--a beautiful butterfly
like the frontispiece of that nature book--but he got into bad company
and got 'stung.' Now, instead of hatching a butterfly, out comes this
robber fly, a long, lean, sleek-looking fellow that has been living for
weeks on the body of that poor caterpillar, and we didn't know it. You
want to watch out who you run with, fellows, or you're liable to turn out
'