oo, could only be
Sure to give back the love and laughter,
That Life so freely gave to me!"

Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one
girl the wish was transmuted into a tear,--into something more tender,
more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all,
and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons
crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes.

"There it goes!" The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame
embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what
Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches
to reflect?

It had been hers--hers--to share the dream of a great inventor, to look
forward with him to the pioneering moment--the beginning of that which
would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together--the moment
when the Thunder Bird should fly.

She never qualified that dream by an _if_, wherever the funds to
equip it might come from--or even if it had to wait a dozen years,
Toandoah's triumph, like that fortune "hung up--" for the great Bird to
make its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no
barrier--when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would
drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite.

But there were steps to be taken in the meantime--exciting steps in the
ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now,
counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless anticipation upon the
first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would
really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the
hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the button and loose the
lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred
miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record
of its flight.

"I--do--believe that my father sleeps with one eye open, thinking of
that golden egg, as he calls it--the little recording apparatus," she
said, when the White Birch Group, as one, asked that the special program
for this ceremonial meeting should be a talk from an inventor's daughter
upon this most daring enterprise of the age. "He says that if
_that_ does not drift back to earth safely with the crow-like
parachute--if anything should happen to it, to the two little wheels,
with the paper winding from one on to the other, all dashed with pencil
mark