“And the pine woods round the foot of the Cairn are lovely,” said Maud.

“Oh!” cried Leslie, drawing a long breath, as if their spicy smell were already about her, “there is nothing I delight in so as pines!”

“You’ll have your fill to-morrow, then; for it’s ten miles through nothing else, and the road is like a carpet with the soft brown needles.”

“I hope Augusta won’t be too tired to feel like going,” said Elinor.

“We had better ask her soon, then; she is looking this way now.  We ought to go, Sin; we’ve got all our settling to do for the night.”

“We’ll walk over with you,” said Sin Saxon.  “Then we shall have done up all the preliminaries nicely.  We called on you—­before you were off the stage-coach; you’ve returned it; and now we’ll pay up and leave you owing us one.  Come, Mr. Scherman; you’ll be so far on your way to Holden’s, and perhaps inertia will carry you through.”

But a little girl presently appeared, running from the hotel portico at the front, as they came round to view from thence.  Madam Routh was sitting in the open hall with some newly arrived friends, and sent one of her lambs, as Sin called them, to say to the older girls that she preferred they should not go away again to-night.

“‘Ruin seize thee, Routh—­less king!’” quoted Sin Saxon, with an absurd air of declamation. “‘Twas ever thus from childhood’s hour;’ and now, just as we thought childhood’s hour was comfortably over,—­that the clock had struck one, and down we might run, hickory, dickory, dock,—­behold the lengthened sweetness long drawn out of school rule in vacation, even before the very face and eyes of Freedom on her mountain heights!  Well, we must go, I suppose.  Mr. Scherman, you’ll have to represent us to Mrs. Linceford, and persuade her to join us to Feather-Cap.  And be sure you get the ’little red’!”

“It’ll be all the worse for Graywacke, if we’re kept in and sent off early,” she continued, sotto voce, to her companions, as they turned away.  “My! what has that boy got?”

CHAPTER VIII.

SIXTEEN AND SIXTY.

After all this, I wonder if you wouldn’t just like to look in at Miss Craydocke’s room with me, who can give you a pass anywhere within the geography of my story?

She came in here “with the lath and plaster,” as Sin Saxon had said.  She had gathered little comforts and embellishments about her from summer to summer, until the room had a home-cheeriness, and even a look of luxury, contrasted with the bare dormitories around it.  Over the straw matting, that soon grows shabby in a hotel, she had laid a large, nicely-bound square of soft, green carpet, in a little mossy pattern, that covered the middle of the floor, and was held tidily in place by a foot of the bedstead and two forward ones each of the table and washstand.  On this little green stood her Shaker rocking-chair