owers for her room instead of
waiting for the usual June picnic.

They started out at nine o'clock Saturday morning. It was an ideal
spring day--not a cloud in the sky and the sunshine so warm that coats
and jackets were shed long before they reached the woods. Some of the
plum trees were out in bloom, and purple and yellow crocuses were
opening in a number of the yards they passed.

"We'll surely find a few spring beauties and yellow violets," said Miss
Brown hopefully.

There was only a faint glimmer of green on twigs and brown earth as they
came into the timber and, for a time, the little band searched in vain.
But Miss Brown showed them where to look in sheltered places and under
protecting leaves. Johnny Carter found the first--a little bunch of
spring beauties fragile and exquisite. After showing them proudly to
"Teacher" he shyly slipped them into Chicken Little's basket.

They found the flowers more plentiful as they penetrated deeper into the
woods. Gleeful shouts of discovery grew more and more frequent as they
swarmed up and down the creek banks, over fallen logs and through the
underbrush, merry and chattering as the squirrels themselves. Chicken
Little counted seven blue-birds and Gertie ten, besides one brilliant
cardinal that flashed by like a flame, whistling joyously.

Chicken Little's basket filled quickly for Johnny's sole interest in the
flowers was apparently the pleasure of finding them, and he gave most of
his spoils to her. Most, but not quite all. He had a little pasteboard
box in his pocket into which he occasionally tucked a particularly
choice spring beauty, carefully moistening its stem in the creek first.

Chicken Little got so many that she generously divided with Gertie when
noon came, and Miss Brown called her flock together. She showed the
children how to preserve the flowers by wrapping their stems in damp
moss and packing them carefully in the boxes and baskets.

The ground was voted too damp for the picnic lunch so "Teacher" aided by
the bigger boys searched till she found a great fallen tree, whose trunk
and spreading branches accommodated her thirty chickens nicely.

The girls lined up along the trunk as near Miss Brown as possible, but
the boys perched aloft, sitting astride some crotch or forked branch
with their dinner pails hung conveniently on a twig nearby.

Doughnuts and sandwiches and apples went from grimy hands to eager
mouths with a rapidity that astonished even