eturning, crowned with success, they met the Senora just
back from a stroll with Mrs. Judson. The three other girls were
already sitting suggestively about the board.

"There," said Blue Bonnet triumphantly, as she deposited the fruit-jar
in the centre of the table with its graceful ferns and honeysuckle
trailing over the oil-cloth, "feast on that!"

"I call that a pretty slim dinner," said Kitty.

Blue Bonnet, disdaining the insinuation, departed rather hastily to
the kitchen, drawn thither by a strong odor and a still stronger
suspicion of disaster. The sheet-iron stove was red-hot. Catching up a
cloth she flung open the oven door, and then backed abruptly away from
the cloud of acrid yellow smoke that rolled thickly into her face.

"Oh, Blue Bonnet!" wailed Amanda. "Everything's burned to a cinder! We
shouldn't have gone off."

Blue Bonnet's only reply was a violent fit of coughing. The smoke
continued to pour in dense billows from the oven. "Grab the pans,
quick!" she managed to choke out.

Amanda made a valiant dive through the smoke, and had just time to
seize the pans from the top and bottom of the oven, when she, too, was
overcome, and in the paroxysm of coughing that followed threatened to
burst a blood-vessel. Finally with crimson faces and streaming eyes,
both cooks gazed ruefully down on the black marbles that had been
potatoes, and the charred drum-stick that had once been a leg of
spring lamb.

"Keep back--no trespassing!" called Blue Bonnet as the other girls,
scenting fun as well as the odor of burning things, came running from
the dining-room. "This is our funeral and we don't want any mourners!"
She waved them back peremptorily, at the same time screening the ruins
with her apron.

The discomfited We are Sevens returned to their seats, and a moment
later there came the sound of spoons being vigorously thumped on the
table.

"We want dinner!" came imperiously from the hungry girls.

Amanda looked imploringly at her partner. "What shall we do?"

Blue Bonnet thought hard for a moment. All at once her brow cleared.
"Here, take the meat, go find a gopher-hole and push that bone down
into it as far as it will go. The potatoes can't be burned all the
way through,--we'll scrape what's left into a bowl. And I'll tell
Uncle Joe I've changed my mind,--we'll have the trout for dinner. And,
Amanda, you'll hurry back, won't you, and put the fish in the pan--I
simply can't touch 'em!"

Each sped to fu