ed
sisters, in a condition of helpless loveliness, in their arms to a place
of safety was a fascinating possibility. The warning was conspicuously
ineffective; everybody looked eagerly forward to the day and the
unchanged locality; to the greatest hopefulness and anticipation was
added the stirring of defiance, and when at last the appointed hour
had arrived, the picnic party passed down the twisting mountain trail
through the heat and glare in a fever of enthusiasm.

It was a pretty sight to view this sparkling procession--the girls cool
and radiant in their white, blue, and yellow muslins and flying ribbons,
the "Contingent" in its cleanest ducks, and blue and red flannel shirts,
the judge white-waistcoated and panama-hatted, with a new dignity
borrowed from the previous circumstances, and three or four impressive
Chinamen bringing up the rear with hampers--as it at last debouched into
Reservoir Canyon.

Here they dispersed themselves over the limited area, scarcely half an
acre, with the freedom of escaped school children. They were secure in
their woodland privacy. They were overlooked by no high road and
its passing teams; they were safe from accidental intrusion from the
settlement; indeed they went so far as to effect the exclusiveness of
"clique." At first they amused themselves by casting humorously defiant
eyes at the long low Ditch Reservoir, which peeped over the green wall
of the ridge, six hundred feet above them; at times they even simulated
an exaggerated terror of it, and one recognized humorist declaimed a
grotesque appeal to its forbearance, with delightful local allusions.
Others pretended to discover near a woodman's hut, among the belt of
pines at the top of the descending trail, the peeping figure of the
ridiculous and envious Sparrell. But all this was presently forgotten
in the actual festivity. Small as was the range of the valley, it
still allowed retreats during the dances for waiting couples among the
convenient laurel and manzanita bushes which flounced the mountain side.
After the dancing, old-fashioned children's games were revived with
great laughter and half-hearted and coy protests from the ladies;
notably one pastime known as "I'm a-pinin'," in which ingenious
performance the victim was obliged to stand in the centre of a circle
and publicly "pine" for a member of the opposite sex. Some hilarity was
occasioned by the mischievous Miss "Georgy" Piper declaring, when it
came to her tur