It was nice sitting there under a big tree kind of all jollying each other and eating fish-balls. We decided that as long as we were so comfortable we would forget about our left-handed resolution for a little while and then go back down to the lake and row to the outlet and take the first road to the left.

“That’s the only sensible thing to do,” Marjorie said.

“That’s what makes me think we shouldn’t do it,” I told her; “we made a resolution to do everything wrong.”

Stella Wingate said. “Well, then, as long as you’re not supposed to be sitting here eating fish-balls you might as well do it.”

“Sure, that’s logic,” Pee-wee said. “We can give the fish-balls a broad interpretation, can’t we? We can construe—what d’you call it—treat them freely.”

“Oh, most conclusively,” I said.

“Treat them as freely as you like,” Marjorie laughed.

Those girls had a lot of eats in a basket. They had crinkly paper napkins and everything. They had some sewing with them, kind of khaki colored stuff, I don’t know what it was. They had a couple of books, too, that they were going to read in the afternoon. Gee whiz, they were awful nice, those girls. Stella Wingate kept making fish-balls in a nice little frying-pan with a wooden handle.

The basket was packed all nice like a trunk. Everything in it had crinkly paper wrapped around it, bottles and everything. Even there were little pinches of salt twisted in crinkly paper. There were hard-boiled eggs in crinkly paper too. Gee whiz, everything was wrapped up just like things around a Christmas tree. Girls are awful funny the way they do things.

Warde said, “Left-handed hikes are all right.”

“And we’re going to have dessert,” Marjorie said. “Stella knows how to make fish-balls, but jelly rolls are my masterpiece.”

I said, “I think we’d like several pieces of masterpieces.”

She said, “Oh, they don’t come in pieces, they come in rolls. I’ll show you how I make them.”

“We’ll show you how to eat them,” Pee-wee said.

I said, “You must excuse our young hero, he was born during a famine. He likes thunder because it reminds him of rolls. He likes ice because it comes in cakes. He wants to live in Greenpoint because he thinks it’s the end of a pickle.”

“How do you make these jelly rolls?” Warde asked her.

She said, “Oh, you’ll see. They’re made of pie crust; they look like ice cream cones only they’re filled with jam instead.”

“Yum, yum,” I said.

“How many are you going to make?” Pee-wee wanted to know.

She said, “As many as you can eat.”

I said, “Thou knowest not what thou sayest, girl.”

She said, “We’ve got a whole big bag of flour and two cans of jam, and we’re going to make oceans of them.”

“Atlantic or Pacific oceans?” Pee-wee piped up.

She said, “After lunch we always make a big boxful of them, just heaping over, and then we just lie back and rest and read aloud and gorge ourselves. We do that every Saturday. We come out in the woods and have a perfectly scrumptious time. And we don’t go home till the jelly cones are all gone.”

Brent said, “We’d even be willing to listen to you read if you’ll let us in on that.”

Stella Wingate said, “You’re perfectly horrid.”

Brent asked them, “Are you reading the Dolly Dimple Series?”

Marjorie said, “No, we’re not reading the Dolly Dimple Series, Mr. Freshy. We’re reading Treasure Island, so there.”

“Jelly cones don’t go with Treasure Island,” I said.

“Oh, yes, they do, you’ll see them go,” Stella said.

“She’s right,” Pee-wee shouted; “because the more excited you get the faster you eat. Treasure Island is better than Dolly Dimple for eating those things—jelly cones. And anyway scouts have to be loyal and we’ll stick to you till they’re all gone and besides that I’ve read Treasure Island so I don’t have to listen if I don’t want to, I can just eat. Gee, I want to see you start making them because if they’re kind of disguised as ice cream cones I bet they’re good.”

“Listen to starving Russia,” I said. “He’s so dumb he thinks Cook’s Tours are named after a chef.”