s a few whoppers, my golly!

The girls giggled uneasily. There was a sting in each of the verses, and
nobody likes to be made fun of. Somehow, Vivien always stuck in pins.

"We'll make one about you," began Patsie, with a rather red face.

"There was a young person named Vivvie,
Who liked all her schoolmates to chivvy----"

But at this point Claudia suddenly, and perhaps rather fortunately,
interrupted.

"What's that queer noise?" she asked. "It sounds like a sort of
suppressed giggling!" There was dead silence for a moment.

"I don't hear anything," said Lorraine.

"I do, though!"

"It's a kind of snorting!"

"I believe it's at the back of the summer-house."

Patsie dashed up and darted round, and, with a yell of vengeance, flung
herself upon three juniors crouched with their impudent noses pressed to
a crack in the boards, through which they had been spectators as well as
listeners during the proceedings. A fourth child was in the very act of
descending from the garden wall.

"You young blighters! How dare you! You deserve to break your legs,
swarming over a high wall like that! It would just have served you right
if you had, and I shouldn't have been sorry for you. Not the least teeny
tiny bit, though you limped about on crutches for the rest of your young
lives! Come here at once!"

As a speedy method of collecting the offenders, Patsie seized them by
their pig-tails, and hauled them in a bunch to the front of the
summer-house. Lorraine eyed them severely.

"If this had been a Masonic meeting," she remarked, "you'd have been
obliged to have your heads chopped off for eavesdropping. Freemasons
keep a sword-bearer on duty, so I'm told, to kill anybody who tries to
intrude. I'm not sure if we oughtn't to do something----"

She paused, as if searching for a suitable punishment.

"Cut off their pig-tails," suggested Patsie grimly.

"No! no!" yelled the interlopers, in genuine alarm.

"I certainly shall if you ever try to come eavesdropping again. I give
you three seconds to get back to the house. Now then--scoot!"

The juniors did not wait to be told twice, but with their precious
pig-tails flying in the wind, raced up the garden at record speed, and
disappeared into the gymnasium. Lorraine laughed as she watched their
long legs careering away.

"I'm afraid they heard the cream of it!" she admitted. "It was rather
clever of them, wasn't it? That little Mona is the limit! She leads all
the