head off!

Although Lonesome Liz had never seen a turtle before, she managed to
clean it and with Mrs. Morse's advice made a pot of soup. Lizzie was
getting bolder as the hours passed; but she announced to Laura that
she believed there must be "ha'nts" in the woods.

"What is a haunt?" asked Laura, curiously.

"Dead folks that ain't contented in their minds," declared the queer
girl.

"And why should the spirits of the dead haunt _these_ woods?" asked
Laura. "Seems to me it's an awfully out of the way place for dead
people to come to."

But Lizzie would not give up her belief in the "spooks."

That first day in camp the girls had no visitors. Through their
binoculars and opera glasses, they could see the boys very active
about their camp across the lake. It was plain they were too busy to
visit Acorn Island.

The girls of Central High, however, had plenty of fun without the
boys. Only Bobby declared that Lil principally spent the time staring
through her opera glasses across the lake, wishing Purt would come
over in the _Duchess;_ but Lil angrily denied _that._

"And you stop trying to stir up a rumpus, Miss," commanded Laura, to
the cut-up. "Let us live, if we can, like a Happy Family."

"My!" drawled Jess, "Mother Wit is nothing if not optimistic."

"Ha! what is your idea of an optimist?" demanded Nellie Agnew.

"Why," Jess said, smiling quietly, "I read of a real optimist once. He
was strolling along a country road and an automobile came along and
hit him in the back. It knocked him twenty feet.

"'Oh, well!' said he, as he got up, 'I was going in this direction,
anyway.'"

"Aw, say!" put in Bobby, "that's all right for a _story;_ but _my_
idea of a real optimist is a man who's dead broke, going into a
restaurant and ordering oysters on the half shell with the hope that
he can pay for the dinner by finding a pearl in one of the bivalves."

They all laughed at that, and then Laura said:

"To get back to our original conversation, let us see if we can't get
on in _this_ camp without friction. And that means that _you_, Bobby,
must set a watch on your tongue."

"What do you suppose my tongue is--a timekeeper?" cried the irreverent
Bobby.

Laura herself helped get dinner, the main dish of which was fried
fish. And how good they tasted, fresh out of the lake!

Mrs. Morse had kept her typewriter tapping at a swift pace in the
cabin, and she could scarcely be coaxed to leave her story long enough
to