dy beach, and the tents had been pitched on ground was
slightly higher. Behind each tent a trench had been dug, so that, in
case of rain, the water flowing down from the high ground in the rear
would be diverted and carried down into the lake.

Before the tents a great fire was burning, and the girls cried out
happily at the sight of plates, with knives and forks and tin pannikins
set by them, all spread out in a great circle near the fire. At the fire
itself two or three men were busy with frying pans and great coffee
pots, and the savory smell of frying bacon, that never tastes half as
good as when it is eaten in the woods, rose and mingled with the sweet,
spicy smell of the balsams and the firs, the pines and the spruces.

"Oh, but I'm glad we're here!" cried Dolly, with a huge sigh of content.
"And I'm glad to see supper--and smell it!"

And what a supper that was! For many the girls, like Bessie, and Zara,
and Dolly, it the first woods meal. How good the bacon was, and the
raised biscuit, as light and flaky as snowflakes, cooked as only woods
guides know how to cook them! And then, afterward, the great plates
heaped high with flapjacks, that were to be eaten with butter and maple
syrup that came from the trees all about them. Not the adulterated,
wishy-washy maple syrup that is sold, as a rule, even in the best
grocery stores of the cities, but the real, luscious maple syrup that is
taken from the running sap in the first warm days of February, and
refined in great kettles, right under the trees that yielded the sap.

And then, when it was time to turn in, how they did sleep! The air
seemed to have some mysterious qualities of making one want to sleep.
And the peace of the great out-of-doors brooded over the camp that
night.

CHAPTER IV

A RECKLESS EXCURSION

In the morning, when the girls awoke, there was no sign of the guides
who had cooked that tempting and delicious supper the night before.

"Well, we're on our own resources now, girls," said the Guardian. "This
may be a sort of Eden--I hope we'll find it so. But it's going to be a
manless one. There'll be no men here until we get ready to go away, if I
can help it--except as visitors."

"Well, I guess we can get along without them all right, for a change,"
said Dolly, blushing a little.

"Some of the men I know who are interested in the Boy Scouts think the
Camp Fire Girls are a good deal of a joke," said Eleanore, with a light
in her eyes