of ferns; but now it was a
glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A
ring of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its
margin.

"HOW sweet!" said Jane.

"Let us dance around it like wood-nymphs," cried Anne, dropping her
basket and extending her hands.

But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane's
rubbers came off.

"You can't be a wood-nymph if you have to wear rubbers," was her
decision.

"Well, we must name this place before we leave it," said Anne, yielding
to the indisputable logic of facts. "Everybody suggest a name and we'll
draw lots. Diana?"

"Birch Pool," suggested Diana promptly.

"Crystal Lake," said Jane.

Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to
perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with
"Glimmer-glass." Anne's selection was "The Fairies' Mirror."

The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil Schoolma'am
Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne's hat. Then Priscilla
shut her eyes and drew one. "Crystal Lake," read Jane triumphantly.
Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had played the pool
a shabby trick she did not say so.

Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young
green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane's back pasture. Across it they
found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted
to explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty
surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane's pasture, came an archway of wild
cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their arms
and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the lane
turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and dark
that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of sky or
sunlight to be seen.

"This is where the bad wood elves dwell," whispered Anne. "They are
impish and malicious but they can't harm us, because they are not
allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around
that old twisted fir; and didn't you see a group of them on that big
freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the
sunshiny places."

"I wish there really were fairies," said Jane. "Wouldn't it be nice to
have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one? What would you wish
for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I'd wish to be