nothing the matter with my lungs, you know.
Dad just wanted an excuse to come up here himself (mother and the girls
used me as an excuse for years, you remember). He's doing big stunts
tramping over the hills. You remember that good story Ware told us that
night up in the house-boat? You wouldn't think Dad would have so much
curiosity, but he's been over there to look at that place Ware told
about. He's left me now to go down to New York to see the lights. . . .
I'm taking quite a literary turn. You know, besides Emerson and those
chaps who camped with him up here, Stevenson was here, too,--good old
R.L.S.!"

Several times Sylvia, Marian, and Dan collaborated in a Sunday round
robin to Allen, in the key of his own exuberances.

CHAPTER XXVII

HEAT LIGHTNING

"We'll finish the peaches to-night, and call it a day's work," remarked
Mrs. Owen. "Sylvia, you'd better give another turn to the covers on
those last jars. There's nothing takes the heart out of a woman like
opening a can of fruit in January and finding mould on top. There,
Annie, that's enough cinnamon. Put in too much and your peaches will
taste like a drug store."

Spicy odors floated from the kitchen of Mrs. Owen's house on Waupegan.
The August afternoon sun struck goldenly upon battalions of glasses and
jars in the broad, screened veranda, an extension of the kitchen itself.
The newly affixed labels announced peach, crab-apple, plum, and
watermelon preserves (if the mention of this last item gives you no
thrill, so much the worse for you!); jellies of many tints and flavors,
and tiny cucumber pickles showing dark green amid the gayer colors. Only
the most jaded appetite could linger without sharp impingements before
these condensations and transformations of the kindly fruits of the
earth.

In Mrs. Owen's corps of assistants we recognize six young women from
Elizabeth House--for since the first of July Elizabeth House has been
constantly represented on Waupegan, girls coming and going in sixes for
a fortnight at the farm. Mrs. Owen had not only added bedrooms to the
rambling old farmhouse to accommodate these visitors, but she had, when
necessary, personally arranged with their employers for their vacations.

On the face of it, the use of her farm as a summer annex to the working
girls' boarding-house in town was merely the whim of a kind-hearted old
woman with her own peculiar notions of self-indulgence. A cynical member
of the summer colony