all off ourselves up to the attic, after ten o’clock, and we gave the chambermaid a dollar next morning, and nobody’s been the wiser since.  And then we walked to the upper village and bought that extraordinary chintz, and frilled and cushioned our trunks into ottomans, and curtained the dress-hooks; and Lucinda got us a rocking-chair, and Maud came in with me to sleep, and we kept our extra pillows, and we should be comfortable as queens if it wasn’t for Graywacke.”

“Now, Sin Saxon, you know Graywacke is just the life of the house.  What would such a parcel of us do, if we hadn’t something to run upon?”

“Only I’m afraid I shall get tired of it at last.  She bears it so.  It isn’t exactly saintliness, nor Graywackeiness, but it seems sometimes as if she took a quiet kind of fun out of it herself,—­as if she were somehow laughing at us, after all, in her sleeve; and if she is, she’s got the biggest end. She’s bright enough.”

“Don’t we tree-toad her within an inch of her life, though, when we come home in the wagons at night?  I shouldn’t think she could stand that long.  I guess she wants all her beauty-sleep.  And Kate Arnall can tu-whit, tu-whoo! equal to Tennyson himself, or any great white American owl.”

“Yes, but what do you think?  As true as I live, I heard her answer back the other night with such a sly little ‘Katy-did! she did! she did!’ I thought at first it actually came from the great elm-trees.  Oh, she’s been a girl once, you may depend; and hasn’t more than half got over it either.  But wait till we have our ’howl’!”

What a “howl” was, superlative to “tree-toading,” “owl-hooting,” and other divertisements, did not appear at this time; for a young man did, approaching from the front of the hotel, and came up to the group on the piazza with the question, “At what time do we set off for Feather-Cap to-morrow?”

“Oh, early, Mr. Scherman; by nine o’clock.”

“Earlier than you’ll be ready,” said Frank Scherman’s sister, one of the “Routh” girls also.

“I shan’t have any crimps to take down, that’s one thing,” Frank answered.  And Sin Saxon, glancing at his handsome waving hair, whispered saucily to Jeannie Hadden, “I don’t more than half believe that, either;”—­then, aloud, “You must join the party too, girls, by the way.  It’s one of the nicest excursions here.  We’ve got two wagons, and they’ll be full; but there’s Holden’s ‘little red’ will take six, and I don’t believe anybody has spoken for it.  Mr. Scherman! wouldn’t it make you happy to go and see?”

“Most intensely!” and Frank Scherman bowed a low graceful bow, settling back into his first attitude, however, as one who could quite willingly resign himself to his present comparative unhappiness awhile longer.

“Where is Feather-Cap?” asked Leslie Goldthwaite.

“It’s the mountain you see there, peeping round the shoulder of Giant’s Cairn; a comfortable little rudiment of a mountain, just enough for a primer-lesson in climbing.  Don’t you see how the crest drops over on one side, and that scrap of pine—­which is really a huge gaunt thing a hundred years old—­slants out from it with just a tuft of green at the very tip, like an old feather stuck in jauntily?”