the excitement of the
boardwalk. You want nature-lovers, the kind of people who really and truly
want to rest and invite their souls. So I suggest my spreading the glad
tidings among the art students here of Greenacre Farms. They are sure to
pass it along to their friends. Make your prices, sisters mine, attractive
and alluring, and I know the world will make a pathway to your door, as
some famous hermit remarked. I am going to sketch a few wonderful placards
announcing the golden opportunity."

The next surprise that came was a visit from Piney Hancock, one Saturday
afternoon in May. The girls had gone up after wild flowers into the
wood-lot. Here Shad and Mr. Robbins had been cutting birches for nearly a
week. Helen wandered through the violet-carpeted glades in a perfect
day-dream. The warmth and glow had fallen on the land so unexpectedly
after days of rain, and now the whole woodland was athrill with the songs
of birds and the chirp and chatter of brooding things.

"I wonder just who Helen is making believe she is now," Doris said,
reflectively, as she watched the sauntering figure in the misty distance.

"Probably Fair Rosamond, or Blanchefleur," Kit replied, down on her hands
and knees after a little patch of flag-root that bordered the bed of a
brook. "You know, this fall I'm going to take a whole sack of bulbs and
come up here through these woods and plant whole clumps of crocus and
narcissus and hyacinths broadcast. Just imagine poet's narcissus
underneath those drooping hemlocks."

"I think there's a deer breaking through that path," Helen called to them
softly, "with long, spreading antlers!"

The girls listened and caught the unmistakable sound of some large animal
pushing its way through the overgrown cow path, but instead of an antlered
head, Molly's white nose showed, and Piney called to them gaily from her
perch on the old mare's back:

"I had to ride over the minute I got the letter. Who on earth do you
suppose, girls, wants to rent one of your tents for the whole summer?"

She slipped off the saddle and held up an envelope, and every one of the
three girls guessed the same name:

"Ralph MacRae!"

"Oh, dear, I thought it would be a surprise to you," Piney laughed,
dropping down on a patch of green moss. "I had written out to Honey, and
told him all about your tent colony. You know they had planned to come
east the first of June anyway, and he wants to know whether you have one
to spare along