THIRD VIOLINIST

XXIV. PLANS

XXV. THE LINCOLN AWARD

XXVI. COMMENCEMENT

XXVII. CRAIG WINTON

XXVIII. HER MOTHER'S STORY

XXIX. THE WISHING-ROCK

ILLUSTRATIONS

Amid the unforgettable shouts of the boys and girls she slid easily on
down the trail

She pointed down to the winding road

One by one, quite breathless with excitement, they climbed to the tower
room

Gyp, Jerry, Tibby, even Graham, superintended Isobel's preparations for
the dress rehearsal

HIGHACRES

CHAPTER I

KETTLE MOUNTAIN

If John Westley had not deliberately run away from his guide that August
morning and lost himself on Kettle Mountain, he would never have found
the Wishing-rock, nor the Witches' Glade, nor Miss Jerauld Travis.

Even a man whose hair has begun to grow a little gray over his ears can
have moments of wildest rebellion against authority. John Westley had
had such; he had wakened very early that morning, had watched the sun
slant warmly across his very pleasant room at the Wayside Hotel and had
fiercely hated the doctor, back in the city, who had printed on a slip
of office paper definite rules for him, John Westley, aged thirty-five,
to follow; hated the milk and eggs that he knew awaited him in the
dining-room and hated, more than anything else, the smiling guide who
had been spending the evening before, just as he had spent every
evening, thinking out nice easy climbs that wouldn't tire a fellow who
was recuperating from a very long siege of typhoid fever!

It had been so easy that it was a little disappointing to slip out of
the door opening from the big sun room at the back of the hotel while
the guide waited for him at the imposing front entrance. There was a
little path that ran across the hotel golf links on around the lake,
shining like a bright gem in the morning sun, and off toward Kettle
Mountain; feeling very much like a truant schoolboy, John Westley had
followed this path. A sense of adventure stimulated him, a pleasant
little breeze whipping his face urged him on. He stopped at a cottage
nestled in a grove of fir trees and persuaded the housewife there to
wrap him a lunch to take with him up the trail. The good woman had
packed many a lunch for her husband, who was a guide (and a close friend
of the man who was cooling his heels at the hotel entrance), and she
knew just what a person wanted who was going to climb Kettle Mountain.
Three hours after, Joh