Motoring to the salad course, the group found the dining-room lighted by blue candles, though the guests were begged not to feel blue. Ragged robins were arranged as a centerpiece, and fluttering blue tissue butterflies marked the places.
The salad was prunes stuffed with peanuts in hearts of lettuce, served with French dressing and Dutch cheese balls.
By the time the sixth stop was reached the sun had set and the moon was coming up, so that the girls sat on the veranda in the moon-light and sipped grape-juice ice to the music of romantic ditties. Lavender streamers were added next to the blue ones, and their badges were complete.
As they finally drove up to the last house, they were greeted by a rainbow of tulle which arched the entrance to the porch.
With their fluttering rainbow ribbon badges and the armful of rainbow packages belonging to the guest of honor, they felt very much at home with the rainbow, and the guest of honor was not even surprised to be asked to seek the pot of gold at the foot.
In the yellow pottery jar which she discovered were as many gold nuggets as there were girls, and each nugget was a little gilt-paper-wrapped joke for the trip.
The real, sure-enough farewell gifts to keep were in the packages progressively received, and there was a jolly time opening them under the rainbow.
BIRTHDAYS AND OTHER ANNIVERSARIES
Birthdays you particularly wish to celebrate happily and successfully. There’s your mother’s birthday or your brother’s or your little son’s or daughter’s birthday or the birthday of the popular president of your special club.
Then there are the various wedding anniversaries that call for suitable recognition, especially the five, ten, and twenty-five year ones.
Besides these there are countless other events that you want to commemorate pleasantly in some way afterward. These various occasions offer fascinating possibilities for the most delightful of social affairs.
A BACHELOR SUPPER
“When I was a bachelor I lived by myself And all the bread and cheese I got, I put upon the shelf; The rats and the mice, they made such a strife I was forced to go to London to buy me a wife. The streets were so broad and the lanes were so narrow I was forced to bring my wife home in a wheelbarrow.”
This old Mother Goose rhyme was the keynote of a bachelor supper which one girl gave for her brother and a few of his friends on his birthday.
The centerpiece on the table was an arrangement of bachelors’ buttons and at every place was a tiny toy wheelbarrow filled with candies, a wee dressed-up dolly dame perched atop of each load.
The rhyme also furnished the reason for the first course, which was most suitably bread and cheese, only the bread was in the form of buttered rounds of toast and the cheese was a delicious Welsh rarebit, accompanied by coffee or gingerale.