d see?"

"Most intensely!" and Frank Scherman bowed a low graceful bow, settling
back into his first attitude, however, as one who could quite willingly
resign himself to his present comparative unhappiness awhile longer.

"Where is Feather-Cap?" asked Leslie Goldthwaite.

"It's the mountain you see there, peeping round the shoulder of Giant's
Cairn; a comfortable little rudiment of a mountain, just enough for a
primer-lesson in climbing. Don't you see how the crest drops over on one
side, and that scrap of pine--which is really a huge gaunt thing a
hundred years old--slants out from it with just a tuft of green at the
very tip, like an old feather stuck in jauntily?"

"And the pine woods round the foot of the Cairn are lovely," said Maud.

"Oh!" cried Leslie, drawing a long breath, as if their spicy smell were
already about her, "there is nothing I delight in so as pines!"

"You'll have your fill to-morrow, then; for it's ten miles through
nothing else, and the road is like a carpet with the soft brown
needles."

"I hope Augusta won't be too tired to feel like going," said Elinor.

"We had better ask her soon, then; she is looking this way now. We ought
to go, Sin; we've got all our settling to do for the night."

"We'll walk over with you," said Sin Saxon. "Then we shall have done up
all the preliminaries nicely. We called on you--before you were off the
stage-coach; you've returned it; and now we'll pay up and leave you
owing us one. Come, Mr. Scherman; you'll be so far on your way to
Holden's, and perhaps inertia will carry you through."

But a little girl presently appeared, running from the hotel portico at
the front, as they came round to view from thence. Madam Routh was
sitting in the open hall with some newly arrived friends, and sent one
of her lambs, as Sin called them, to say to the older girls that she
preferred they should not go away again to-night.

"'Ruin seize thee, Routh--less king!'" quoted Sin Saxon, with an absurd
air of declamation. "'Twas ever thus from childhood's hour;' and now,
just as we thought childhood's hour was comfortably over,--that the
clock had struck one, and down we might run, hickory, dickory,
dock,--behold the lengthened sweetness long drawn out of school rule in
vacation, even before the very face and eyes of Freedom on her mountain
heights! Well, we must go, I suppose. Mr. Scherman, you'll have to
represent us to Mrs. Linceford, and persuade her to join us to
Feath