st now," answered the disturbed girl, "'you girls
better keep away from Acorn Island. That's no place for you to go
camping.' And then walked right off with his old clipping, and without
giving me a chance to ask him what he meant," concluded Bobby
Hargrew.

CHAPTER II

PLANS FOR THE SUMMER

Bobby Hargrew came to school the next morning with rather a sour
face for her. "What's the matter, dear?" asked Nell Agnew,
sympathetically.

"I wish I were a bird," grumbled Bobby.

"So you could soar into the circumambient ether and leave all mundane
things below?" queried Jess Morse, with a chuckle.

"No," said Bobby, in disgust. "So I wouldn't have a toothache. I was
up with one of my old grinders half the night."

"Have it pulled," suggested Laura.

"Say!" cried Bobby. "That's the easiest thing in the world to say and
the hardest to do. And you know it, Mother Wit! You can have an old
toothache that will make you feel like committing suicide; and when
you get to the dentist shop you wish you _had_ committed suicide
before you got there," and jolly little Bobby began to grin again.

"Suicide is a serious matter," said Nellie, gravely.

"Surely, surely," the cut-up replied, dropping her voice to a gruesome
pitch. "Listen!

"'Beside a sewer a man lay dead,
A dagger in his side;
The coroner's decision read:
"He died of suicide."

'Now if this man at home in bed,
Had in this manner died,
Then could the coroner have said:
"He died of homicide"?'

"Never joke about serious things, Nell."

"Hush, Bobby!" commanded Laura Belding. "Tell us, do, if your father
has agreed to let us go camping on Acorn Island?"

"Of course," replied the younger girl. "And he says there is a cabin
there that can be made tight for ten dollars. It's all right to camp
under canvas; but if a big storm should come up he says we'd be glad
of that cabin."

"Great!" announced Jess Morse.

"The cabin shall be your mother's particular shelter," said Laura.
"Eh, girls?"

"If she is kind enough to go with us," said Nellie, "she should have
the very best of everything."

"She can have _my_ share of the wood ants and red spiders," chuckled
Bobby. "But it's all right, girls. Father Tom says we can have the
island to ourselves. And believe me: this bunch of girls of Central
High will sure