oining, two by two--
There's one wide river to cross!
Some so scared they daren't say 'Booh!'
To the one wide river to cross!"

"That was _us_, Ruthie!" broke off Helen, laughing. "Remember how scared
we were when we walked up the old Cedar Walk with The Fox, here, and
didn't know whether we were going to be met with a brass band or a ticket
to the guillotine?"

The Fox, otherwise Mary Cox, suddenly turned red. Ruth hastened to smooth
over her chum's rather tactless speech, for Mary had been a different girl
at that time from what she was now, and the memory of the hazing she had
visited on Ruth and Helen annoyed her.

"And what did meet us?" cried Ruth, dramatically. "Why, a poor, emaciated
creature standing at the steps of this old West Dormitory, complaining
that she would starve before supper if the bell did not sound soon. You
remember, Heavy?"

"And I feel that way now," said Jennie Stone in a hollow tone. "I don't
know what makes me so, but I am continually hungry at least three times a
day--and at regular intervals. I must see a physician about it."

"Aren't you afraid of the effect of eating so much, Jennie?" asked Helen,
gently.

"What's that? Is there a new disease?" asked the fleshy girl, trying to
express fear--which she never could do successfully in any such case.
Jennie had probably never been ill in her life save as the immediate
result of over-indulgence in eating.

"No, my dear," said Ruth Fielding's chum. "But they do tell me that eating
_too_ much may make one _fat_."

"Horrors!" ejaculated Jennie. "I can't believe you. Then that is what is
the matter with me! I thought I looked funny in the mirror. I must be
getting a wee bit plump."

"Plump!"

"Hear her!"

"She's the girl who went up in the balloon and came down 'plump!'"

The shouts that greeted Heavy's seriously put remark did not disturb the
fleshy girl at all. "That is exactly the trouble," she went on, quite
placidly. "And it cost me half a dollar yesterday."

"What's that?" asked somebody, curiously.

"Where?" asked another girl.

"In chapel. Didn't you see me trying to crawl through between the two rows
of seats? And I got stuck!"

"Did you have to pay Foyle the fifty cents to pry you out, Heavy?"
demanded Ann Hicks.

"No. I dropped the half dollar and tried to find it. I looked for it;
that's all I _could_ do. I was too fat to find it."

"Did you look good, Jennie?" asked Ruth, sympathetically