Mrs. Linceford, the elder married daughter of the Hadden family,—­many years the elder of her sisters, Jeannie and Elinor,—­was about to take them, under her care, to the mountains for the summer, and she kindly proposed joining Leslie Goldthwaite to her charge.  “The mountains” in New England means usually, in common speech, the one royal range of the White Hills.

You can think what this opportunity was to a young girl full of fancy, loving to hunt out, even by map and gazetteer, the by-nooks of travel, and wondering already if she should ever really journey otherwise.  You can think how she waited, trying to believe she could bear any decision, for the final determination concerning her.

“If it had been to Newport or Saratoga, I should have said no at once,” said Mr. Goldthwaite.  “Mrs. Linceford is a gay, extravagant woman, and the Haddens’ ideas don’t precisely suit mine.  But the mountains,—­she can’t get into much harm there.”

“I shouldn’t have cared for Newport or the Springs, father, truly,” said Leslie, with a little hopeful flutter of eagerness in her voice; “but the real mountains,—­O father!”

The “O father!” was not without its weight.  Also Mr. Waylie, whom Mr. Goldthwaite called on and consulted, threw his opinion into the favoring scale, precisely as Leslie had foreseen.  He was a teacher who did not imagine all possible educational advantage to be shut up within the four walls of his or any other schoolroom.  “She is just the girl to whom it will do great good,” he said.  Leslie’s last week’s lessons were not accomplished the less satisfactorily for this word of his, and the pleasure it opened to her.

There came a few busy days of stitching and starching, and crimping and packing, and then, in the last of June, they would be off.  They were to go on Monday.  The Haddens came over on Saturday afternoon, just as Leslie had nearly put the last things into her trunk,—­a new trunk, quite her own, with her initials in black paint upon the russet leather at each end.  On the bed lay her pretty balmoral suit, made purposely for mountain wears and just finished.  The young girls got together here, in Leslie’s chamber, of course.

“Oh, how pretty!  It’s perfectly charming,—­the loveliest balmoral I ever saw in my life!” cried Jeannie Hadden, seizing upon it instantly as she entered the room.  “Why, you’ll look like a hamadryad, all in these wood browns!”

It was an uncommonly pretty striped petticoat, in two alternating shades of dark and golden brown, with just a hair-line of black defining their edges; and the border was one broad, soft, velvety band of black, and a narrower one following it above and below, easing the contrast and blending the colors.  The jacket, or rather shirt, finished at the waist with a bit of a polka frill, was a soft flannel, of the bright brown shade, braided with the darker hue and with black; and two pairs of bright brown raw-silk stockings, marked transversely with mere thread-lines of black, completed the mountain outfit.