"I love the woods, too," said Grace, "almost enough to wish I were a
gypsy."

On down the shady wood road they traveled, sometimes stopping to watch a
squirrel or a chipmunk or to knock down a few burrs from the chestnut
trees they occasionally found along the way. Once they stopped and
played hide and seek for half an hour. By one o'clock they were
ravenously hungry. Hippy clamored incessantly for food.

"Let us feed him at once, and have peace," exclaimed Nora. "I'm hungry,
too. It seems an age since breakfast."

A halt was made and the contents of two of the lunch packages were
arranged on a little tablecloth at the foot of a great oak. The hungry
young folks gathered around it and in a short time nothing remained of
the lunch excepting the packages reserved for supper.

"I move we all take a half hour's rest and then go on," said David. "We
still have a mile to go before we are through the wood. We'll feel more
like walking after we've rested a little."

"Let us all sit in a row with our backs against this fallen tree and
tell a story," said Grace. "Hippy, you are on the end, so you can begin
it, then after you have gone a little way, Nora must take up the
narrative, and so on down the line until the story is finished."

"Fine," said Hippy. "Here goes:"

"Once upon a time, in the heart of a deep forest, there lived a most
beautiful prince. He had all that heart could wish; still he was not
happy, for, alas, he was too fat."

At this statement there was a shout of laughter from his listeners, at
which Hippy, pretending anger, glared ferociously and vowed that he
would not continue. Nora thereupon took up the narrative and convulsed
her hearers with the remedies tried by the fat prince to reduce his
weight. Then the story was passed on to Anne. With each narrator it grew
funnier, until the party screamed with laughter over the misfortunes of
the ill-starred prince.

Hippy ended the tale by marrying the hero to a princess who was a golf
fiend and who forced the poor prince to be her caddy.

"From the day of his marriage he chased golf balls," concluded Hippy,
"and the habit became so firmly fixed with him that he even rose and
chased them in his sleep. He lost flesh at an alarming rate, and three
months after his wedding day they laid him to rest in the quiet
churchyard, with the touching epitaph over him, 'Things are not what
they seem.'"

Hippy buried his face in his handkerchief and sobbed audibly until