“Well, I’m not you,” countered Cecily, “and I wouldn’t want to frighten any one as I was frightened.  It was an awful dream—­but it was kind of interesting, too.”

“I’ve had some real int’resting dreams,” said Peter, “but I can’t remember them long.  I wish I could.”

“Why don’t you write them down?” suggested the Story Girl.  “Oh—­” she turned upon us a face illuminated with a sudden inspiration.  “I’ve an idea.  Let us each get an exercise book and write down all our dreams, just as we dream them.  We’ll see who’ll have the most interesting collection.  And we’ll have them to read and laugh over when we’re old and gray.”

Instantly we all saw ourselves and each other by inner vision, old and gray—­all but the Story Girl.  We could not picture her as old.  Always, as long as she lived, so it seemed to us, must she have sleek brown curls, a voice like the sound of a harpstring in the wind, and eyes that were stars of eternal youth.

CHAPTER XXII.  THE DREAM BOOKS

The next day the Story Girl coaxed Uncle Roger to take her to Markdale, and there she bought our dream books.  They were ten cents apiece, with ruled pages and mottled green covers.  My own lies open beside me as I write, its yellowed pages inscribed with the visions that haunted my childish slumbers on those nights of long ago.

On the cover is pasted a lady’s visiting card, on which is written, “The Dream Book of Beverley King.”  Cecily had a packet of visiting cards which she was hoarding against the day when she would be grown up and could put the calling etiquette of the Family Guide into practice; but she generously gave us all one apiece for the covers of our dream books.

As I turn the pages and glance over the naïve records, each one beginning, “Last night I dreamed,” the past comes very vividly back to me.  I see that bowery orchard, shining in memory with a soft glow of beauty—­“the light that never was on land or sea,”—­where we sat on those September evenings and wrote down our dreams, when the cares of the day were over and there was nothing to interfere with the pleasing throes of composition.  Peter—­Dan—­Felix—­Cecily—­Felicity—­Sara Ray—­the Story Girl—­they are all around me once more, in the sweet-scented, fading grasses, each with open dream books and pencil in hand, now writing busily, now staring fixedly into space in search of some elusive word or phrase which might best describe the indescribable.  I hear their laughing voices, I see their bright, unclouded eyes.  In this little, old book, filled with cramped, boyish writing, there is a spell of white magic that sets the years at naught.  Beverley King is a boy once more, writing down his dreams in the old King orchard on the homestead hill, blown over by musky winds.

Opposite to him sits the Story Girl, with her scarlet rosetted head, her beautiful bare feet crossed before her, one slender hand propping her high, white brow, on either side of which fall her glossy curls.