There is almost always at every summer sojourn some party of persons who are to the rest what the mid-current is to the stream; who gather to themselves and bear along in their course—­in their plans and pleasures and daily doings—­the force of all the life of the place.  If any expedition of consequence is afoot, they are the expedition; others may join in, or hold aloof, or be passed by; in which last cases, it is only in a feeble, rippling fashion that they go their ways and seek some separate pleasure in by-nooks and eddies, while the gay hum of the main channel goes whirling on.  At Outledge this party was the large and merry schoolgirl company with Madam Routh.

“I don’t see why,” said Martha Josselyn, still looking out, as the “little red” left the door of the Green Cottage,—­“I don’t see why those new girls who came last night should have got into everything in a minute, and we’ve been here a week and don’t seem to catch to anything at all.  Some people are like burrs, I think, or drops of quicksilver, that always bunch or run together.  We don’t stick, Susie.  What’s the reason?”

“Some of these young ladies have been at Madam Routh’s; they were over here last evening.  Sin Saxon knows them very well.”

“You knew Effie Saxon at school, too.”

“Eight years ago.  And this is the little one.  That’s nothing.”

“You petted her, and she came to the house.  You’ve told her stories hundreds of times.  And she sees we’re all by ourselves.”

“She don’t see.  She doesn’t think.  That’s just the whole of it.”

“People ought to see, then.  You would, Sue, and you know it.”

“I’ve been used to seeing—­and thinking.”

“Used!  Yes, indeed!  And she’s been used to the other.  Well, it’s queer how the parts are given out.  Shall we go to the pines?”

CHAPTER X.

GEODES.

A great cliff-side rearing itself up, rough with inaccessible crags, bristling with old, ragged pines, and dark with glooms of close cedars and hemlocks, above a jutting table of rock that reaches out and makes a huge semicircular base for the mountain, and is in itself a precipice-pedestal eighty feet sheer up from the river-bank; close in against the hill front, on this platform of stone, that holds its foot or two of soil, a little, poor unshingled house, with a tumbledown picket-fence about it, attempting the indispensable dooryard of all better country-dwellings here where the great natural dooryard or esplanade makes it such an utter nonsense,—­this is the place at which the “little red” drew up, ten minutes later, to leave Prissy Hoskins’s parcel.

Dakie Thayne jumped down off the front seat, and held up his arms to help Leslie out over the wheel, upon her declaring that she must go and do the errand herself, to get a nearer look at Hoskins life.

Dakie Thayne had been asked, at Leslie’s suggestion, to fill the vacant sixth seat beside the driver, the Thoresbys one and all declining.  Mrs. Thoresby was politic:  she would not fall into the wake of this schoolgirl party at once.  By and by she should be making up her own excursions, and asking whom she would.