houseboat! The poor little
'Merry Maid'! How lonely she must be without us. Tom Curtis and
Jack Bolling wrote and asked me to let them tow us up the
Rappahannock River this summer. They are going on a motor trip.
But, alas and alack! we haven't any money to pay our expenses,
so I fear there will be no houseboat party this summer. It's
dreadfully sad, but, more than anything else, I regret not
seeing you, Phil. With my dearest love. Write soon. Your devoted

"MADGE."

Phyllis finished her letter with a warm feeling around her heart but a
sigh on her lips. No "Merry Maid" this summer! Well, Phyllis had not
expected it, yet it seemed cruel to think of the four girls and Miss
Jones being separated for another year from their "Ship of Dreams,"
where they had spent two wonderful holidays.

The story of how Madge Morton, Phyllis Alden, Lillian Seldon and Eleanor
Butler came into possession of a houseboat is fully set forth in the
first volume of this series, entitled "MADGE MORTON, CAPTAIN OF THE
'MERRY MAID.'" The happy summer spent by the four young women on board
the "Merry Maid," chaperoned by Miss Jenny Ann Jones, one of the
teachers in the boarding school which they attended, was one long to be
remembered.

While anchored in a quiet bit of water, a part of the great Chesapeake
Bay, they made many friends, chief among whom were Mrs. Curtis, a
wealthy widow, and her son Tom. Mrs. Curtis's instant liking for Madge,
her subsequent offer to adopt her, and the remarkable manner in which
Madge and Phyllis were instrumental in discovering their friend's own
daughter, who had been lost at sea years before, in a poor fisher girl
whom they rescued from her cruel foster father, formed a lively
narrative.

"MADGE MORTON'S SECRET" told of the girls' second sojourn on their
houseboat, which was anchored near Old Point Comfort. There the girls
saw much of the social life of the Army and Navy, and it was while there
that Madge incurred the enmity of a young woman named Flora Harris, who
made the little captain's life very unpleasant for a time.

The mysterious cutting of the "Merry Maid's" cable on a stormy night,
the voyaging of the little boat out into the bay, and the island shore
to which she drifted in the gray dawn, and how, after living the life of
young Crusoes for many weeks, they were rescued and returned to their
sorrowing friends, made absorbing reading for those interested in
follo