I said.

Well, you ought to have seen Pee-wee. Even Mr. Ellsworth had to laugh.

"How can a fellow your age write books?" he fairly screamed. "You have
to have sunsets and twilights and gurgling brooks and--"

"You leave the gurgling brooks to me," I said; "I'll make them gurgle
all right. There's going to be plenty of action in these books. And
Pee-wee Harris is going to be the village cut-up." "Are you going to
have girls?" he shouted.

"Sure I'm going to have girls--gold haired girls--all kinds--take your
pick."

"Good night!" Pee-wee shouted, "I see your finish."

Well, pretty soon everybody was shouting at the same time and Pee-wee
was dancing around, saying we were all crazy. Most of the Raven Patrol
were with him and they ought to be called the Raving Patrol, believe me.
Then Mr. Ellsworth held up his hand in that quiet way he has. "This
sounds like the Western Front or a Bolshevik meeting," he said, "and
I'm afraid our young Raven, Mr. Pee-wee Harris, will presently explode
and that would be an unpleasant episode for any book."

"Good night!" I said. "Don't want any of my books to end with an
explosion."

Then he said how it would be a good idea for me to write up our
adventures and how he'd help me whenever I got stuck and how he
guessed the author of Tom Slade would put in fancy touches for me,
because he lives in our town and he's a whole lot interested in our
troop. He said that breezes and distant views and twilights and
things aren't so hard when you get used to them and even storms and
hurricanes are easy if you only know how. He said girls aren't so easy
to manage though.

"I'll help you out with the girls," Pee-wee said; "I know all about
girls. And I'll help you with the names of the chapters, too."

"All right," Mr. Ellsworth said, "I think Pee-wee will prove a
valuable collaborator."

"A which?" Pee-wee said, kind of frightened.

So then we all laughed and Mr. Ellsworth said it was getting late and
we'd better settle about collecting books for the soldiers.

We decided that after we got to camp I'd begin writing up our
adventures on the trip, but we couldn't decide how we'd all go in our
boat, and that was the thing that troubled us a lot, because the fellows
in our troop always hang together and we didn't like the idea of being
separated.

Well, I guess that's all there is to tell you about the meeting, and in
the next chapter I'm going to tell you all about how we collected the
b