indignantly resigning the preparation of
breakfast to Johnny, went fishing.

"He should have gone long ago," mused Diane, flinging her line with
considerable force into the river. "It's a great mercy as it is that
Aunt Agatha didn't appear and weep all over the camp about him. I'm
sorry I mended the shirt. Not but that I was fortunate to find
something that would make him go, but a shirt's such a childish thing
to fuss about. And, anyway, I preferred him to leave in a friendly,
conventional sort of way!"

There are times, alas, when even fish are perverse! Thoroughly out of
patience, Diane presently unjointed her rod, emptied the can of worms
upon the bank, and returned to camp, where she found Johnny
industriously piling up a heap of litter.

"What are you going to do with these?" demanded Diane, indicating an
eccentric woodland broom and a rake of forked twigs and twine. "Throw
them out?"

Johnny nodded.

"Well, I guess you're not!" sniffed Diane indignantly. "They're mighty
convenient. That rake is really clever."

Johnny's round eyes showed his astonishment. He had heard his perverse
young mistress malign these inventions of Philip's most cruelly.

Then what a woodland commotion arose after breakfast! What a cautious
stamping out of fire and razing of tents! What a startled flutter of
birds above and bugs below! What an excited barking on the part of
Rex, who after loafing industriously for a week or so, felt called upon
to sprint about and assist his mistress with a dirt-brown nose! What a
trampling of horses and a creaking of wheels as the great green wagon
wound slowly through the shadowy forest road and took to the open
highway with Rex at His mistress's feet haughtily inspecting the
wayside.

And what a wayside, to be sure! Past fields of young rye from which a
lazy silver smoke seemed to rise and follow the wind-billowing grain;
past fields of dark red clover rife with the whir and clatter of mowing
machines as the farmers felled the velvety stalks for clover hay; past
snug white farmhouses where perfumed peonies drooped sleepily over
brick walks; on over a rustic bridge, skirting now a tiny village whose
church spire loomed above the trees; now following a road which lay
rough and deeply rutted, among golden fields of buttercups fringed with
bunch grass.

Farmers waved and called; housewives looked and disapproved; children
stared and jealous canines pettishly barked at the haughty