Her guests were eager to accept her invitation.  There was space enough for all of them and two or three more might easily be accommodated within, while a bit of smooth grass outside the entrance almost added another room, “if you aren’t particular about a roof,” as Ethel Brown said.

“Do you suppose Roger has never found this!” wondered Dorothy.  “See, there’s room enough for a fireplace with a chimney.  You could cook here.  You could sleep here.  You could live here!”

The others laughed at her enthusiasm, but they themselves were just as enthusiastic.  The possibilities of spending whole days here in the shade and cool of the trees and rocks and of imagining that they were in the highlands of Scotland left them almost gasping.

“Don’t you remember when Fitz-James first sees Ellen in the ’Lady of the Lake’?” asked Ethel Blue.

“He was separated from his men and found himself in a rocky glen overlooking a lake.  The rocks were bigger than these but we can pretend they were just the same,” and she recited a few lines from a poem whose story they all knew and loved.

    “But not a setting beam could glow
    Within the dark ravines below,
    Where twined the path in shadow hid,
    Round many a rocky pyramid.”

“I remember; he looked at the view a long time and then he blew his horn again to see if he could make any of his men hear him, and Ellen came gliding around a point of land in a skiff.  She thought it was her father calling her.”

“And the stranger went home to their lodge and fell in love with her—­O, it’s awfully romantic.  I must read it again,” and Dorothy gazed at the rocks around her as if she were really in Scotland.

“Has anybody a knife?” asked Della’s clear voice, bringing them all sharply back to America and Rosemont.  “My aunt—­the one who has the hanging flowerpots I was telling you about—­isn’t a bit well and I thought I’d make her a little fernery that she could look at as she lies in bed.”

“But the ferns are all dried up.”

“‘Greenery’ is a better name.  Here’s a scrap of partridge berry with a red berry still clinging to it, and here’s a bit of moss as green as it was in summer, and here—­yes, it’s alive, it really is!” and she held up in triumph a tiny fern that had been so sheltered under the edge of a boulder that it had kept fresh and happy.

There was nothing more to reward their search, for they all hunted with Della, but she was not discouraged.

“I only want a handful of growing things,” she explained.  “I put these in a finger bowl, and sprinkle a few seeds of grass or canary seed on the moss and dash some water on it from the tips of my fingers.  Another finger bowl upside down makes the cover.  The sick person can see what is going on inside right through the glass without having to raise her head.”

“How often do you water it?”

“Only once or twice a week, because the moisture collects on the upper glass of the little greenhouse and falls down again on the plants and keeps them, wet.”