ng a reel with each other. It is time to tell
the reader of the what and why.

Mrs. Linceford, the elder married daughter of the Hadden family,--many
years the elder of her sisters, Jeannie and Elinor,--was about to take
them, under her care, to the mountains for the summer, and she kindly
proposed joining Leslie Goldthwaite to her charge. "The mountains" in
New England means usually, in common speech, the one royal range of the
White Hills.

You can think what this opportunity was to a young girl full of fancy,
loving to hunt out, even by map and gazetteer, the by-nooks of travel,
and wondering already if she should ever really journey otherwise. You
can think how she waited, trying to believe she could bear any decision,
for the final determination concerning her.

"If it had been to Newport or Saratoga, I should have said no at once,"
said Mr. Goldthwaite. "Mrs. Linceford is a gay, extravagant woman, and
the Haddens' ideas don't precisely suit mine. But the mountains,--she
can't get into much harm there."

"I shouldn't have cared for Newport or the Springs, father, truly," said
Leslie, with a little hopeful flutter of eagerness in her voice; "but
the real mountains,--O father!"

The "O father!" was not without its weight. Also Mr. Waylie, whom Mr.
Goldthwaite called on and consulted, threw his opinion into the favoring
scale, precisely as Leslie had foreseen. He was a teacher who did not
imagine all possible educational advantage to be shut up within the four
walls of his or any other schoolroom. "She is just the girl to whom it
will do great good," he said. Leslie's last week's lessons were not
accomplished the less satisfactorily for this word of his, and the
pleasure it opened to her.

There came a few busy days of stitching and starching, and crimping and
packing, and then, in the last of June, they would be off. They were to
go on Monday. The Haddens came over on Saturday afternoon, just as
Leslie had nearly put the last things into her trunk,--a new trunk,
quite her own, with her initials in black paint upon the russet leather
at each end. On the bed lay her pretty balmoral suit, made purposely for
mountain wears and just finished. The young girls got together here, in
Leslie's chamber, of course.

"Oh, how pretty! It's perfectly charming,--the loveliest balmoral I ever
saw in my life!" cried Jeannie Hadden, seizing upon it instantly as she
entered the room. "Why, you'll look like a hamadryad, all in th