This climax was too much for Eurie.  She threw down her fork to clap her hands in softly glee.

“Oh, Ruthie, Ruthie!  How has your dismal castle of favoritism faded!  Yonder is the Queen of American society eating pie at this very instant with the very fork which did duty on her potato, and here goes the King of the feast, wiping his lips on his own handkerchief instead of a damask napkin.”

It was at this moment, when Ruth’s follies and ill humors were rising to an almost unbearable height, that her higher nature asserted itself, and shone forth in a rich, full laugh.  Then, in much glee and good feeling, they followed the crowd down the hill to the auditorium.

For the benefit of such poor benighted beings as have never seen Chautauqua, let me explain that the auditorium was the great temple where the congregation assembled for united service.  Such a grand temple as it was!  The pillars thereof were great solemn trees, with their green leaves arching overhead in festoons of beauty.  I don’t know how many seats there were, nor how many could be accommodated at the auditorium.  Eurie set out to walk up and down the long aisles one day and count the seats, but she found that which so arrested her attention before she was half-way down the central aisle that she forgot all about it, and there was never any time afterward for that work.  I mean to tell you about that day when I get to it.  The grand stand was down here in front of all these seats, spacious and convenient, the pillars thereof festooned with flags from many nations.  The large piano occupied a central point; the speaker’s desk at its feet, in the central of the stand; the reporters’ tables and chairs just below.

“I ought to have one of those chairs,” Marion said, as they passed the convenient little space railed off from the rest of the audience.  “Just as if I were not a real reporter because I write in plain good English, instead of racing over the paper and making queer little tracks that only one person in five thousand can read.  If I were not the most modest and retiring of mortals I would go boldly up and claim a seat.”

“What is to be next?” Ruth asked.  “Are we supposed to be devoted to all these meetings?  I thought we were only going to one now and then.  We won’t be alive in two weeks from now if we pin ourselves down here.”

“In the way that we have been doing,” chimed in Eurie.  “Just think here we have been to every single meeting they have had yet, except the one last night and one this morning.”

“We are going to skip every one that we possibly can,” said Marion.  “But the one that is to come just now is decidedly the one that we can’t.  The speaker is Dr. Calkins, of Buffalo.  I heard him four years ago, and it is one of the few sermons that I remember to this day.  I always said if I ever had another chance I should certainly hear him again.  I like his subject this afternoon, too.  It is appropriate to my condition.”