for dinner."

So the four girls, three little folks and one bigger one, went around the
corner toward home, and two strangers, standing on the porch, watched them
till they were quite out of sight.

"It would be funny," said Alice, "if we'd ever get to know them. I'm sure
I'd like to."

"Wouldn't it though!" exclaimed Mary Jane. "I hope we do!"

And all the time they were eating their first dinner in Chicago, and
telling mother and father about the children they had seen and making
plans about what to do to-morrow, they were thinking about those two girls
and wishing to know them better.

Little did they guess what would really truly happen before the week was
over!

THE FOLKS AROUND THE CORNER

Three whole days of flat hunting! And of all the fun she had ever had in
her more than five years of life, Mary Jane thought flat hunting in
Chicago was the most fun of all! She loved the mystery of each new
apartment; the guessing which room might be hers and which mother's; the
hunting up the door bell and hearing its sound (for as you very well know
each door bell has a sound of its own); the poking into closets and
pantries and porches. It was the most delightful sort of exploring she had
ever come across and she couldn't at all understand why mother and father
got tired and somewhat discouraged. For _her_ part Mary Jane was tempted
to wish that they would never find a flat, well hardly that; but that
finding the right one would take a long, oh, a very long time!

But by the afternoon of the third day, her legs began to get a little
tired too, and her eyes looked more often to the green of the Midway they
occasionally saw and she thought that flats, even empty flats, really
should have chairs for folks to sit on. So, as a matter of fact, she
wasn't half as sorry as she had thought she would be, when, on the
afternoon of the third day of hunting the Merrill family came across a
charming little apartment.

It was on the second floor of a very attractive red brick building; it had
five rooms, quite too small, father thought, but then one can't have
everything, they had found, and every room was light and sunny and
cheerful. But the part about it that Mary Jane and Alice liked the best
was the back porch. To be sure there was a front porch, a pretty, little
porch with a stone railing and a view way down the street toward the park
and lake. But off the dining room the girls discovered a small balcony
that overl