Barley' a-watching o' those happy lasses," he whimsically
confessed in the ear of a king fern. "I could, for sure, same's we used
to dance it in the glen around a bonfire!"

But if the heather in his heart, reinforcing chauffeur primness, checked
even the first lashing kick of a Highland Fling, it did not restrain
him, that grave Church Elder, from taking part later in something fully
as giddy; a wild and storming torchlight procession.

"Now! what we need, girls, is a good r-rich pine-knot, with a juicy,
resinous knot in it, that will burn ten minutes, anyway, for signaling
purposes," said Tomoke, the personified Lightning, as the "C. F. G."
proclamation over, the magic moment came for the flashing of the light
of this particular camp fire in speaking fire from mountain to
mountain--across the mile and a half of intervening valley. That
inflammable knot was not hard to find. Split with the toy axe which the
girl who had won an honor bead for signaling carried at her belt--a
modern Maid Marion, at home in all woodcraft--it blazed, transplendent,
a foot-long flambeau, searching the Pinnacle's darkest nooks, winning
sleepy birds from their slumbers, calling upon them to follow too, as
Tomoke, nimble of foot as her aerial namesake, presently dashed up the
hill, with it held high!

Brilliant as a starshell--where near-by objects were concerned--it
counted the needles upon the little, awed pine trees. It painted the
wild excitement upon leaping girls' faces, lit dancing Jack-o'-lanterns
in their eyes as, scrambling, they followed the light-shod
leader--gold-slippered by the torch--in a breathless tumble-up over rock
and needled carpet, amid scandalized bough and shamefaced crag and
little, blinking torrent.

It turned to nocturnal dewdrops the bright eyes of the
birds,--scandalized, too, yet resolved, at all costs, to come in on the
fun!

Robins, flame-breasted in the glow, a black-throated green
warbler--blossom of the night--a purple grackle, its boat-tail stiff as
a fan-shaped rudder, and, "leggeddy-last," a cawing crow, they circled
on low wing after the brilliant torch,--all pecking at the wonder in the
air!

It caught the whooping amazement on Andrew's smooth-shaven upper lip,
shimmering through a veil of anxiety lest, somewhere, there might be
another "Deev's Chair" around, or a madcap lassie to sit in it, as, with
an irresistible "Hoot mon!" he brought up the rear of the fantastic
revel; the rush of green-cla