Surely, it was the sweetest grace ever said.

A duet between a hermit thrush and a Camp Fire Girl! Pinnacle vespers!

If gladness did not flow freely now, then human hearts were a desert!

Instead, they were enchanted ground, those girlish hearts, carried away by a sense that Mother Earth did not, after all, have to go outside her own atmosphere for her fairy-land,–her golden crown of romance.

preluded again the little brown hermit-lover, with the rufous tail and ruffled, speckled breast, from an evergreen twig of the low pine-scrub.

And, once more, the aping response, the counterfeit thrush-note, came from some little branch of that goodly green tree known as the White Birch Group.

“Who’s doing it? Oh-h! who’s doing it–answering?” breathed Pemrose Lorry, feeling thrown into the shade with her Thunder Bird; which wasn’t altogether bad for her, either. “Oh! it’s you, is it? Where’s the whistle–the bird-caller’s whistle?”

“Here. Look!” A maiden shy as a hermit-thrush herself, with rufous lights in her sleek brown hair, and tiny, red-brown specks flecking the iris of her eyes–corresponding to the many freckles upon her small face, with a luminous quality added–opened a volunteering palm.

In its concave hollow, also marbled with sun-spots, lay the magic whistle, the two gleaming tin disks about the size of a fifty-cent piece, joined one upon another with an eighth of an inch distance between them, through whose simple medium the music in the heart of a fourteen-year-old girl had so attuned itself to a little of the melody in the breast of the thrush as to draw–actually draw–the hermit himself forth on to a rock on the edge of the thicket, looking eagerly, a trifle doubtfully, for the raw singer–the mate, who had answered him.

“Romeo and Juliet!” laughed the Guardian. “Such a dear little feathered Romeo, with a beak lined with pure gold–and a fairy oboe in his breast! Juliet–” she lightly touched the brown-plumaged maiden–“Juliet answering from her balcony, this mound!”

“Only a parrot Juliet who can coin such shabby notes to answer him with!” breathed the girl, shyly nursing her whistle. “No doubt he’s saying to himself: ‘Shucks! Where’s that hermit–or hermitess–’” merrily, “‘with the frog in her throat, or the great, big worm?’”“Oh! do-o try it again, anyway?” pleaded the visitors together. “It’s won-der-ful! We’ll be as still–as still as a nun’s chapel!”

And obligingly, once more, the human thrush lifted up her notes of speckled sweetness compared to the silver purity of the strength which answered, the hermit fluting passionately upon his rock:

Carried beyond himself–perhaps after all, he was a lonely hermit–he actually hopped from his rock, unalarmed, towards the firelight, when–when the concert was suddenly interrupted by a woodland gorgon!

By Andrew who, rearing his six feet two of gaunt, hurlothrumbo length from a fern-bed, hooking stick in hand, suddenly lifted from the embers a boiling kettle.“Fegs! ’twas like to scald somebody wi’ its daffy simmer,” he explained apologetically to the Guardian, being, in his capacity of chauffeur, used to camping emergencies among these picturesque hills–so like, in many respects, the wilds of his Scottish Highlands where the Lady of the Lake, an original Camp Fire Girl, shot her skiff across the blue-eyed loch.

“My certy! but ’twas pretty to see yon merle, though!” he murmured, having restored the kettle to sanity. “Fine it minded me, ma’am, o’ the time when I was a boy, huntin’ like a nickum for the nests o’ mavis an’ merle–blackbird an’ thrush–when I’d rise ‘wi’ lark an’ light!’ Fegs!” Scotch humor ripping chauffeur silence, “yon was a thing to make a sober body young again; a while agone I don’t know but I was feelin’ like the last o’ pea-time; an’–an’, noo, I’m a green pea again,... or I would be but for the one sair memory,” added Andrew, the true-penny, under his breath.“Yes–yes, and you had to go jumping around like a parched pea, and frightening the beautiful merle, the thrush, away!” complained Una, aggrieved. “Oh! how did you ever learn to mimic its call, at all?” she cried, catching at the wrist of the human merle, now very practically engaged in toasting bacon-strips on the end of a stick.

“My brother taught me; my only brother, Stud–Studley–Studart they nickname him in camp–I don’t know why,” was the fluttering response.

“A corruption of Stoutheart, I should say!” supplied the Guardian, now busily frying flapjacks. “Of all the Boy Scouts in my husband’s troop, he’s the lion-heart,” laughingly. “So I understand!”

“Yes, oh! yes, but he’s so-o nice, with it,” cooed the merle’s brown-eyed “mate.” “He has never–oh! never–squeezed me out of anything, just because I was a girl; always said that two–two–could hunt together and make good headway!” softly.

“And so they can: and so they will, when it comes to the grandest quest of all, the hunt for truth and justice at the polls, voting side by side! Girls! Dear–girls!” The eyes of Tanpa, the Guardian, were ablaze now with more than the firelight’s glow, as she tossed her browned cakes on to a platter. “Dear girls! In the new, the wider future before us–soon to confront all of you–let us bring to it our Camp Fire hall-mark: the hall-mark of the woods: purity of the Pinnacle’s breath, the ‘pep’ of the outdoor dawn–tenderness of the twilight, when we feel that God is near!... And now–and now! let us sing our grace, not for this food alone, but for the new manna which has fallen for us–the glorious manna of opportunity.”

“If we have earned the right to eat this bread, happy are we, but if unmerited Thy blessings come, may we more faithful be!”On wings of faith the moved chant floated forth, led by the girl-thrush in a sweet soprano, supported by the sonorous roll of the Pinnacle organ, the murmuring pine trees; and the voices of the slender tree choir, the slim, white-tunicked boy-birches, bore it aloft–aloft to Heaven.

“So you’re not only gifted as a ‘merle’, you sing as a girl, too!” said Pemrose presently, nestling nearer to the maiden with the whistle in her green breast-pocket. “You must love birds very much in order to imitate a thrush-song like that.”

“Well! my ceremonial name, as a Camp Fire Girl, signifies a little brown bird of the woods; so I thought it was ‘up to me’ to learn to converse with my kind!” was the half-shy, half-spicy answer. “My brother Stud and I have no end of fun, now in the early summer when the birds have just arrived, and are mating, calling them around our camp.”

“Here–here, let me explain that we have a sort of Community camp for boys and girls about three miles from here, on the wooded shores of The Bowl, that lovely, egg-shaped lake among the hills,” put in Tanpa, an air-drawn picture in her glowing tones. “There are two big bungalows, a couple of hundred yards apart, one for the Troop, one for the Group! Of course, we can’t occupy them all the time, at present, not until school is closed, but we constantly go out there over night–to watch the summer coming–and for week-ends.”

“Oh! the lake and the woods around it are more wonderful now than at any other season of the year,” put in one of the older girls, an Assistant-Guardian. “And we can always keep warm, you know, even if there is a cold spell in May, because the boys chop wood for us.”

“Yes, and we do their mending; oh! and quite often the shoe pinches–the stocking, I mean–when the holes are just haggles!” The eyebrows of a fair-haired, pretty girl of fifteen were ruefully arched, over eyes of merriment. “But we do–do have such fun at our Get Togethers–our picnics and parties,” went on she, whose ceremonial name was Aponi the Butterfly of the mountain group.

“Hur-ra-ah! There are two such Get Togethers coming off quite soon now–one the day after to-morrow–Saturday–a picnic at Snowbird Cave, to explore some other caves afterwards upon the further side of the river, the blue Housatonic.”

This contribution came, piecemeal, from several feasting mouths together.

“Oh! the Housatonic–blue–Hous-a-tonic!” Pemrose bent demurely over her flapjack and cocoa, curling her toes under her as she recalled her view of it from the Devil’s Chair. “And what about the second Get Together–when is that to be?” she asked.

“A week from Saturday: Jubilate! It’s our anniversary day as a White Birch Group when we hold a sort of carnival in he afternoon in honor–in honor of the de-ar birch trees just bursting into leaf.” Aponi fluttered like green tree-hair, herself. “And that’s to be followed–whoopee!–by a party: a real, full-blown June dance in the evening–to which all the boys are invited. And–and, maybe, some girls not of our Groups will find an invitation tucked into their stockings, too,” slily. “But for the picnic this week the Boy Scouts are hosts.”

“I guess, if they knew there were two strange girls in camp–such girls–they’d scuttle to ‘come across’ with an invitation, too!” laughed the one slangy member inseparable from every group, whose talk is the long stitch in the thread of conversation.

“Do you think they would? Oh! I don’t know about that. Boys are such–such griffins, sometimes.”

Wormwood was in the eye of Pemrose, pointing the accusation, a new and gloomy pessimism born of the Devil’s Chair and Jack at a Pinch.

“Ours aren’t!” It was the voice of the little girl-thrush lifted in blue-jay belligerence now. “Our boys aren’t queer fish–not a bit!” rising to hot defense of Stud, the Stoutheart, who even in callow youth, was of opinion that Life in every phase was a game for two–in which two, of differing sexes, could hunt together and make good headway.

“To be sure, they do love to get off jokes on each other–and occasionally on us,” went on Jessie, the brown-haired merle in maiden form. “They have a society of older boys in their camp called the Henkyl Hunters’ Brigade. My brother Stud–he’s a patrol leader–belongs to it. And they go on the war-path occasionally–and publish a bulletin about their doings.”

“What’s a henkyl?” Una’s mouth was wide open; upon its gusty breath rode horned toads and plated lizards, in imaginary solution.“A henkyl! Oh! if you ask them, they say it’s a freak of an animal that they hunt up and down in the woods, trying to get its scalp, or–or catch it alive. Which they seldom or never do!” Jessie’s eyes sparkled. “Stud says a whole ‘henkyl’ is hard to capture; it’s so sure to shed its horns or its teeth just as you pounce upon it.”

Pem was staring intently at the speaker, her black brows drawn together over eyes as speculatively blue as ever they had been in Toandoah’s laboratory when grasping, or trying to, grave problems of the air.

“Oh! I know. I know!” she cried suddenly, the blue breaking up in the firelight into a harlequin patchwork of merry gleams. “A henkyl! Why-y! it’s a joke. A joke that they’re forever chasing up and down, trying to get a laugh against somebody,–that absurd brigade!”

“Companionship with a Thunder Bird has sharpened your wits,” smiled the Guardian. “A practical joke it is, that most elusive thing to pull off whole, point and all, with the laugh entirely on one side! Well! we mustn’t give them any occasion to turn the chase against us, air their wit in our direction, by failing in our demonstration presently–the signaling practice to which we challenged them; eh, Tomoke?”

“No, indeed!” A sixteen-year-old girl, gray-eyed, vibrant with energy, mobile as the Lightning, the mettlesome Lightning, from which she took her Camp Fire name, spoke up spiritedly. “We’re going to flash a message right across the valley, over to old Round-top, that sleepy, dark mountain, a couple of miles away, just as soon as the daylight is all faded out,” she explained.

“Oh, ho! That’s what the Guardian meant when she spoke of showing us something–a display–with red fire, eh?” gasped Pemrose. “How are you going to signal–with what code?”

“Morse code–and a good, fat two-foot pine-knot, oozing with resin!” smiled the Lightning, vivid with inspiration. “How–how about sending over this message: ‘Two strange girls in camp; you ought to meet them’?”

“Lovely! That will hit the mark!” came the appreciative chorus, to the song of logs. “Then–then you’ll see old Round-top wake up, quick’s a wink and ‘come across’ with an invitation–an invitation to that banner picnic the day after to-morrow!”