L

That adventurous afternoon on Pendragon Hill was the last chance the
girls of Lakeview Hall had that term for bobsledding. School closed the
next day and those pupils who lived farthest away, and who went home for
the holidays, started that very evening by train from Freeling.

Nan and her chum, Bess Harley, were two who hurried away from the Hall.
Tillbury was a night's ride from Lakeview Hall, and the chums did not
wish to lose any of their short stay at home.

It had already been planned and agreed to that Nan and Bess were to go to
Chicago to visit in the Masons' home during a part of this vacation, and
the two friends, who knew very little of city life, were eager indeed for
the new experience.

Walter and Grace had started for Chicago that morning, and when the two
Tillbury girls saw how hard it was snowing when Charley, with his 'bus on
runners, drove them to the station, they wished that they had asked the
privilege of Dr. Beulah Prescott, the principal, of going early, too.

"This yere's goin' to be a humdinger of a storm," prophesied Charley.
"You gals'll maybe get snowed up on the train."

"Oh! What fun!" cried the thoughtless Bess.

"I hope not!" proclaimed Nan.

"I think it would be fun, Nan," urged her chum.

"Humph! How about eating?" queried the red-haired girl, Laura Polk, who
would be one of the party as far as the Junction.

"Oh, there's a dining-car on this train," said May Winslow, who was to
speed away to the South to spend Christmas, where there was no ice or
snow, and where the darkeys celebrate the holiday with fire-crackers, as
Northern people do the Fourth of July.

"That's all right about the dining-car," said Nan. "All right for you
girls who are going to Chicago. But our train from the Junction has no
'eats' attached and if we get snowed up--"

"Ugh!" cried her chum. "Don't suggest such a horrid possibility. I'm
going right now to buy out the lunch counter and take it along with us."

"And break your teeth on adamantine sandwiches, harder than Professor
Krenner's problems in algebra?" suggested May.

The red-haired girl began to laugh. "I thought Bess never would carry a
shoe-box lunch again. 'Member that one you two girls from Tillbury
brought to school with you, last September?"

"Will we ever forget it?" groaned Nan.

"I don't care!" exclaimed Bess. "You can't have a bite of what I buy,
Laura Polk!" and she marched away to the lunch counter and spent most of
her r