hen will we have the paper?" asked Edna.

"Depends on when you send in your stories. This is Wednesday. Have you
your stories nearly done, girls? I guess it will take some time to print
them all out carefully."

"I can finish mine to-morrow," said Eunice.

"Mine's a horrid little thing, but I wasn't born bright," sighed Edna.
"I'll get it done by Friday. I can't think up more than five lines a
day."

"Mine's all done," said Cricket. "But, oh, girls! a newspaper ought to
have ever so many more things than stories in it. We ought to have
jokes, and advertisements, and deaths, and marriages, and all that. And
puzzles, too."

"Oh-h!" groaned Edna. "Then you'll have to make them up, that's all. I
think it's the editor's business, anyway."

"We'll each do a few. That won't be hard," suggested Eunice.

"Suppose nobody dies, or gets married, that we know of?" asked literal
Edna.

"Make them up, child," answered Cricket, with a funny air of
superiority. "In a paper you can make up _any_thing. It doesn't have to
be true. Don't you know how often papa says 'that's only a newspaper
story?'"

"Making them up is just the trouble," persisted Edna. "If anybody really
died, or married, or anything, it would be easy enough to write of it,
of course. How silly people are who make real newspapers. Why do they
ever make up anything, when real things are happening all the time?"

"It's more fun to make things up," answered Cricket, from the depths of
her experience. "But we can write about that old red hen, and about poor
little Wallops"--referring to a little black cat, lately deceased. "Then
each of you must send me in some things besides your stories, and I'll
make some up myself. Let's appoint next Tuesday for a meeting, if I can
get the paper done. If I don't, we'll have it as soon as I can get it
ready."

"Shall that be a rule?" laughed Eunice.

"No, miss. But suppose we make this a rule--how many rules have we now?"

"Three," said Edna, referring to the constitution.

"Then rule four: 'The paper shall be read on Wednesday afternoons, at
three o'clock, in Rocky Nook.' Why, girls! I made up that name just
then!" interrupting herself, in her surprise.

"It's a splendid name," the girls said.

"We might call it 'Exiles' Bower,'" laughed Edna, teasingly, for the
boys had given that name to Bear Island since the girls' imprisonment
there.

"If you like," said Cricket, the unteasable, serenely.

"Don't you think that