The Story Girl was barefooted and barearmed, having rolled the sleeves of her pink gingham up to her shoulders.  Around her waist was twisted a girdle of the blood-red roses that bloomed in Aunt Olivia’s garden; on her sleek curls she wore a chaplet of them; and her hands were full of them.

She paused under the outmost tree, in a golden-green gloom, and laughed at us over a big branch.  Her wild, subtle, nameless charm clothed her as with a garment.  We always remembered the picture she made there; and in later days when we read Tennyson’s poems at a college desk, we knew exactly how an oread, peering through the green leaves on some haunted knoll of many fountained Ida, must look.

“Felicity,” said the Story Girl reproachfully, “what have you been doing to Peter?  He’s up there sulking in the granary, and he won’t come down, and he says it’s your fault.  You must have hurt his feelings dreadfully.”

“I don’t know about his feelings,” said Felicity, with an angry toss of her shining head, “but I guess I made his ears tingle all right.  I boxed them both good and hard.”

“Oh, Felicity!  What for?”

“Well, he tried to kiss me, that’s what for!” said Felicity, turning very red.  “As if I would let a hired boy kiss me!  I guess Master Peter won’t try anything like that again in a hurry.”

The Story Girl came out of her shadows and sat down beside us on the grass.

“Well, in that case,” she said gravely, “I think you did right to slap his ears—­not because he is a hired boy, but because it would be impertinent in any boy.  But talking of kissing makes me think of a story I found in Aunt Olivia’s scrapbook the other day.  Wouldn’t you like to hear it?  It is called, ’How Kissing Was Discovered.’”

“Wasn’t kissing always discovered?” asked Dan.

“Not according to this story.  It was just discovered accidentally.”

“Well, let’s hear about it,” said Felix, “although I think kissing’s awful silly, and it wouldn’t have mattered much if it hadn’t ever been discovered.”

The Story Girl scattered her roses around her on the grass, and clasped her slim hands over her knees.  Gazing dreamily afar at the tinted sky between the apple trees, as if she were looking back to the merry days of the world’s gay youth, she began, her voice giving to the words and fancies of the old tale the delicacy of hoar frost and the crystal sparkle of dew.

“It happened long, long ago in Greece—­where so many other beautiful things happened.  Before that, nobody had ever heard of kissing.  And then it was just discovered in the twinkling of an eye.  And a man wrote it down and the account has been preserved ever since.