opened, its occupants
having come up by the night train.

"When I grow up," said Muffie enviously, "I'll be a grocer's boy."

"An' I'll be the other one," said Max, so filled with glorious visions
suddenly that he forgot his original intention of coughing.

But now there came briskly round the corner one of the big Burunda
wagonettes, overflowing with ladies and children and picnic baskets and
plainly bound for the waterfall.

"Why," said Lynn excitedly, "there are Effie and Florence."

"And Frank," cried Muffie joyously.

"Why," said one of the ladies in the wagonette, "there are the little
Lomaxes,--I didn't know they were up." She stopped the driver.

Lynn and Muffie and Max were for rushing out and charging bodily into
the vehicle, and indeed one of the ladies was beckoning encouragingly to
them all.

Lynn's swift imagination saw themselves borne joyously off to the loved
waterfall; she felt the very water of the cool delicious pools on her
hot feet.

But Pauline, with a look of absolute tragedy on her fair little face,
banged the gate and kept her brothers and sisters on the hither side of
it.

"We're contagious," she shouted.

"Wha-a-at?" said the lady.

"Whooping cough," said Pauline with extreme dejection in her tone, and
as if for a guarantee of her veracity Max was seized with a paroxysm
then and there, and Muffie followed suit.

"Oh, drive on!" cried the lady hastily to her man, and gave an alarmed
look at her own little flock. But she pulled up again fifty yards away
and came back on foot and stood a very respectable distance away from
the infected spot.

"I'm so sorry, chickies," she said kindly; "that's a wretched visitor
for the holidays. Have you been very bad?"

"I go nearly lack in the face," said Max, not without pride.

"Is mother with you?" said the lady, Mrs. Gowan by name, somewhat
anxiously, "and your father?"

"No," said Pauline sadly, "they've gone to New Zealand,--mamma got quite
ill with nursing us, and daddie got it too, and he wouldn't come up
here."

Muffie giggled. "People's laugh 'cause daddie's got it," she
volunteered.

"But in New Zealand, you see," explained Pauline gravely, "no one will
know him."

Mrs. Gowan smiled a little--as others had done. For indeed the thought
of a dignified Judge drawing in his breath and whooping on the bench
like a frightened child was not without its humorous side.

The poor Judge had become quite sensitive about the ridicul