off on some errand with the Doctor. After luncheon she drew them mysteriously into the square tent, and lowered the curtains.
‘What is it?’ Polly whispered, with an anxious expression of countenance. ‘Have you lost your gold thimble again, or your temper, or have you discovered a silver mine?’
‘I have found,’ she answered mysteriously, ‘the most beautifully secret place you ever beheld. It will be just the spot for us to write and study in when we want to be alone; or it will even do for a theatre; and it is scarcely more than half a mile up the cañon.’
‘How did you find it?’ asked Margery.
‘As I was walking along by the brookside, I saw a snake making its way through the bushes, and—’
‘Goodness!’ shrieked Polly, ‘I shall not write there, thank you.’
‘Goose! Just wait a minute. I looked at it, and followed at a distance; it was a harmless little thing; and I thought, for the fun of it, I would just push blindly on and see what I should find, because we are for ever walking in the beaten path, and I long for something new.’
‘A bad instinct,’ remarked Madge, ‘and one which will get you into trouble, so you should crush it in its infancy.’
‘Well, I took up my dress and ploughed through the chaparral, until I came, in about three minutes of scratching and fighting, to an open circular place about as large as this tent. It was exactly round, which is the curious part of it; and in the centre was one stump, covered with moss and surrounded by great white toadstools. How any one happened to go in there and cut down a single tree I can’t understand, nor yet how they managed to bring out the tree through the tangled brush. It is so strange that it seems as if there must be a mystery about it.’
‘Certainly,’ said Margery promptly. ‘A tragedy of the darkest kind! Some cruel wretch has cut down, in the pride and pomp of it beauty, one sycamore-tree; its innocent life-blood has stained the ground, and given birth to the white toadstools which mark the spot and testify to the purity of the victim.’
‘Well,’ continued Bell, impressively, ‘I knew I could never find it again; and I wanted so much you should see it that I took the ball of twine we always carry, unrolled it, and dropped the thread all the way along to the brookside, like Phrygia, or Melpomene, or Anemone, or whatever her name was.’
‘Or Artesia, or Polynesia, or Euthanasia,’ interrupted Polly. ‘I think the lady you mean is Ariadne.’
‘Exactly. Now we’ll take papa to see it, and then we’ll fit it up as a retreat. Won’t it be charming? We’ll call it the Lone Stump.’
‘Oh, I like that; it makes me shiver!’ cried Polly. ‘I’m going to write an ode to it at once. Ahem! It shall begin—let me see—
‘O lonely tree,
What cruel “he”
Did lay thee low?
Tell us the facts;
Did cruel axe
Abuse thee so?’
‘Sublime! Second verse,’ said Bell slowly, with pauses between the lines:—
‘Or did a gopher,
The wicked loafer,
Gnaw at thy base,
And, doing so,
Contrive to go,
And leave no trace?’
‘Oh dear!’ sighed Margery; ‘if you will do it, wait a minute.
‘O toadstools white,
Pray give us light
Upon the question.
Did gopher gnaw,
And live in awe
Of indigestion?’
‘Good!’ continued Bell:—
‘Or did a man
Malicious plan
The good tree’s ruin,
And leave it so
Convenient low,
A seat for Bruin?
For travelling grizzlies, you know. We may go there and see a hungry creature making a stump-speech, while an admiring audience of grasshoppers and tarantulas seat themselves in a circle on the toadstools.’
‘Charming prospect!’ said Madge. ‘I don’t think I care to visit the Lone Stump or pass my mornings there.’
‘Nonsense, dear child; it is just like every other part of the cañon, only a little more lonely. It is not half a mile from camp, and hardly a dozen steps from the place where the boys go so often to shoot quail.’
‘Very well,’ said the girls. ‘We must go there to-morrow morning; and perhaps we’d better not tell the boys,—they are so peculiar. Jack will certainly interfere with us in some way, if he hears about it.’
‘Now let us take our books and run down by the pool for an hour or two,’ said Bell. ‘Papa and the boys are all off shooting, and mamma is lying down. We can have a cool, quiet time; the sunshine is so hot here by the tents.’
Accordingly, they departed, as they often did, for one of the prolonged chats in which school-girls are wont to indulge, and which so often, too, are but idle, senseless chatter.
These young people, however, had been fortunate in having the wisest and most loving guardianship, so that all their happy young lives had been spent to good purpose. They had not shirked study, and so their minds were stocked with useful information; they had read carefully and digested thoroughly whatever they had read, so that they possessed a good deal of general knowledge. The girls were bright, sensible, industrious little women, who tried to be good, too, in the old-fashioned sense of the word; and full of fun, nonsense, and chatter as they were among themselves, they never forgot to be modest and unassuming.
The boys were pretty well in earnest about life, too, with good ambitions and generous aspirations. They had all been studying with Dr. Winship for nearly two years; and that means a great deal, for he was a real teacher, entering into the lives of his pupils, sympathising with them in every way, and leading them, through the study of nature, of human beings, and of God, to see the beauty and meaning of life.
Geoffrey Strong, of course, was older than the rest, having completed his junior year at college; but Dr. Winship, who was his guardian, thought it wiser for him to rest a year and come to him in California, as his ambition and energy had already led him into greater exertions than his age or strength warranted. He was now studying medicine with the good Doctor, but would go back to the ‘land of perpetual pie’ in the fall and complete his college course.
A splendid fellow he was,—so earnest, thoughtful, and wise; so gravely tender in all his ways to Aunt Truth, who was the only mother he had ever known; so devoted to Dr. Winship, who loved him as his own elder son.
What
