Dinner hour is generally a most interesting moment in a picnic, and this was the time when the young gentlemen showed their gallantry by partaking only of such viands as had come from the baskets of their favorites among the young ladies.

A cloth was spread upon the ground; seats were extemporized for the ladies out of carriage cushions, waterproofs and wraps; the knives, forks and plates were dealt out as impartially as possible, and we passed a very merry hour.

When the repast was over, the party dispersed—­some to play croquet, others to row upon the lake, or to stroll about under the trees; some young ladies produced books and bright bits of fancy-work, while Gabrielle, Arthur and I, with our pretty captain, Miss Murray, and one of her attendant cavaliers, decided to pass away the time by playing a game—­no trivial game, however; neither “consequences” nor fortune-telling, but an eminently scientific one entitled “Twenty Questions.”  For the benefit of the uninitiated I will remark that the oracle chooses a subject (silently), and the others are allowed to put twenty questions to him to enable them to divine it—­usually commencing with “Is the object that you have in your mind to be found in the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom?”

Gabrielle is very clever in this somewhat abstruse game, for she possesses her mother’s spirit of inquiry and love of reasoning, and she passes entire evenings with Arthur, pursuing the most perplexing and intangible subjects.  She and Arthur are admirably matched in this game; for if she is unparalleled in the quickness with which she will follow up a clue and triumphantly announce the mysterious object, after asking eighteen or nineteen questions, Arthur is no less adroit in selecting unusual subjects, and so artfully parrying her questions as to give her the least possible assistance.  I often hear them call to each other—­

“I have chosen a subject; you will never in the world guess it!”

Then follows an hour of questions and reasoning, with inferences drawn and rejected, and a display of sophistry that would do credit to a more fully fledged lawyer than Arthur is at present.

Yesterday, after dinner, they launched into one of their games, and Gabrielle guessed after eighteen questions what would have required forty, I am sure, from any one else—­the eighty-eighth eye of a fly!

Another was even more puzzling.  The object belonged, Arthur assured her, to the vegetable kingdom, the color was white, and he had often met it within a dozen yards of the railway station.  “A daisy,” was the first and natural solution, but she was, he assured her, very far adrift.  “A telegraph post,” she next announced, but she was again unsuccessful.  At this point I left them; but after an hour had passed Gabrielle ran up to my room to tell me that she had guessed it—­a polka dot upon one of her morning dresses!

The object chosen by Arthur at the picnic was the right horn of the moon.  Gabrielle, this time, sat beside me and enjoyed the perplexity of the questioners, for not until we were about to step into the carriage to return home did they guess it.