e also kept her fingers on the
pulse of affairs and knew pretty well how to strike a popular vein.
Hence the membership of her classes was always on the increase.
Indeed, at the beginning of this school year, she had to turn away
something like forty applicants, for want of room and accommodations.

Hiawatha Institute was founded as a Camp Fire Girls' school, and when
Uncle Sam became involved in the European war, the national need for
nurses appealed strongly to Camp Fire Girls everywhere. What could
they do? The very nature of the training of the girls from Wood
Gatherer to Torch Bearer made the question, so far as they were
concerned, a self-answering one. They had all the broad commonsense
rudiments of nursing. With some advanced science on top of this, they
would be experts.

But military authorities said that the nurses ought to have some
military drill. War nurses must be organized, and there was no better
method of effecting this orderly requisite than by military training.

One well-known captain of infantry informed Madame Cleaver that war
nurses could not reach the highest grade of efficiency unless they
were able to march in columns from one camp to another and be
distributed in squads at the points needed.

With all this information at her tongue's end, the madame put the
matter to her uniformed girls in the assembly hall. Rumor of what was
coming had reached them in advance, so that it did not fall as a
surprise. The vote was unanimous in favor of the plan. The needed
nursing expert was already a member of the faculty. The classes were
formed a few days later.

These were the girls that gathered around a big out-door campfire--it
was really a bonfire--in the snow of mid-winter on the evening of the
opening of this story. Most of them were rich men's daughters, but
there were no snobs among them. They were girls of vigor and vim,
intelligence and imagination, practical and industrious. They were
lively and fond of a good time, but--most of them, at least,--would
not slight a duty for pleasure. Behind every enjoyment was a pathway
of tasks well done.

Madame Cleaver was Chief Guardian of the fifteen Camp Fires of the
Institute. The faculty was not large enough to supply all the adult
guardians required, but that fact did not prove by any means an
insurmountable difficulty. More than enough young women in
Westmoreland, well qualified to fill positions of this kind,
volunteered to donate their services