“Is that all you’d want of me?”

“It’s a wonderful region for grasshoppers out there, you know; you’d improvise us such charming dishes of locusts and wild honey!  As for cookies, a snowflake and a sunbeam, and there they are,” said Ray, making inroads on the Fort-Riley stores; while little Jane set down a cup of beaten cream by his side.

“Janets are trumps!  Vivia, don’t you wish you were going to the war?”

“Yes,” said Vivia.

“There is something in it, isn’t there?” said Ray.  “You’ll sit at home, and how your blood will boil!  What keeps you women alive?  Darning stockings, I suppose.  There’s only one thing I dread:  ’t would be hard to read of other men’s glory, and I lying flat on my back.  Would you make me cookies then, little Jane?”

Little Jane only gave him one swift, shy look:  there was more promise in it than in many a vow.  In return, Ray tossed her the sparkle of his dancing glance an instant, and then his eager fancies caught him again.

“We read of them,” said he, “those splendid scenes.  What can there be like acting them?  Ah, what a throb there is in it!  The rush, the roar, the onslaught, the clanging trumpet, the wreathing smoke, and the mad horses.  Dauntlessly defying danger.  Ravishing fame from the teeth of the battery.  See in what a great leap of the heart you spring with the forlorn hope up the escalade!  Your soul kindles and flashes with your blade.  You are nothing but a wrath.  To die so, with all one’s spirit at white-heat, awake, alert, aflame, must send one far up and along the heights of being.  And if you live, there are other things to do; and how the women feel their fiery pulses fly, their hot tears start, as you go by, thinking of all the tumult, the din, the daring, the danger, and you a part of it!”

Little Jane was trembling and tying on her bonnet.  As for Vivia, she burst into tears.

“Oh, Ray!” sobbed she, “I wish I were a man!”

“I don’t!” said he.  “Oh, it’s rip-roarious!  Come, let’s follow our leader.  We’ll bring you back the cropple-crown, auntie.”

And so they departed, while, breaking into fresh carols, ringing and dulcet, as they went, Vivia’s voice resounded till the woods pealed to the echo:—­

    “He waved his proud arm, and the trumpets were blown
    The kettle-drums clashed, and the horsemen rode on,
    Till o’er Ravelston crags and on Clermiston lea
    Died away the wild war-notes of Bonny Dundee!”

Pursuing the white sun-bonnet down the pasture, Ray kept springing ahead with his elastic foot, threshing the juniper-plats that little Jane had already searched, and scattering about them the pungent fragrance of the sweet-fern thickets,—­the breath of summer itself; then returning for a sober pace or two, would take off his hat, thrust a hand through the masses of his hair that looked like carved ebony, and show Vivia that his shadow was exactly as long