ther
matter when she was asked to do a favor.

A team and a responsible driver having been secured for the morrow,
Peggy returned to the cottage highly elated over her success, and lent
her aid to the disheartened cooks. When Joe drove the plodding team up
to the cottage on the following morning, the array of baskets on the
porch promised satisfaction for the appetites of double the number
awaiting his coming. Lucy Haines sat in the hammock beside Peggy, her
sunbonnet replaced by a little black hat, which had done service through
the dust of many summers, and originally was better suited for a woman
of fifty than a girl of seventeen. Peggy studying this new friend's
clear-cut profile and fresh coloring, could not help wondering how Lucy
would look in a really girlish costume. She was of the opinion that
under such circumstances she would be actually pretty.

"Fine morning for your shindig," remarked Joe, who had long before lost
all traces of bashfulness in Peggy's presence. "Don't you get them
horses to speeding, now, so's you'll be arrested for fast driving." He
chuckled gleefully over this thunder-bolt of wit, and bethought himself
to add, "How's your chickens coming on?"

"Why, it isn't time for them to hatch for ten days yet. The old hen has
broken three of the eggs. Don't you think that is pretty clumsy?"

"Clumsy, if it ain't worse. You'd better keep an eye on her. Sometimes
they break their eggs a-purpose just to eat 'em." And having opened
Peggy's eyes to the dark perfidy possible to the nature of the yellow
hen, Joe departed whistling, and the gay party climbed aboard. Peggy sat
on the front seat with Lucy, Dorothy snuggling between them, and
reflected on the surprising distance from the seat to the ground, and on
the appalling size of the clumsy hoofs of the farmhorses. She was glad
Lucy was on hand to take up the lines with such a business-like air, and
that the responsibility of driving did not devolve on herself.

The picnic-grounds Mrs. Cole had especially recommended were several
miles away, though the winding road on either hand gave such charming
glimpses of shady groves, with sunlight filtering through the leaves,
and of a placid river, with silver birches all along its bank, like
nymphs who had come down to the water to drink, that it really seemed as
if almost any place where they cared to stop would be an admirable
picnic-ground. But Lucy appealed to, agreed with Mrs. Cole, that Day's
Woods we