A whole long vacation begun! Alice home all day and plenty of time for walks and playing together! It seemed almost too good to be true. For although Alice was several years older than her sister Mary Jane, the two girls had always had very happy times playing together and they had missed each other very much during school days. Now that the Holden family was away, for they went off, bag and baggage, to their country home up in Wisconsin the very day school closed, the two girls had no one near by to play with, so more than ever before they needed and enjoyed each other’s company. Frances Westland had gone back to the country and the Merrill girls had not made friends with anyone who lived near enough to make a convenient playmate.

They didn’t do as some girls and boys do in vacation, get up late in the morning. No, they thought it was more fun to get up promptly and have breakfast with Dadah and then, when the afternoon got hot, as often happened, they took a nice long rest and dressed fresh and clean for dinner. On many a day Mrs. Merrill packed a basket of dinner and they met Mr. Merrill over by the park, had their dinner near one of the small lagoons or close to the big lake. After dinner they played ball or tennis—Alice was learning to be very good at tennis.

“I wish there were swans in our park,” said Mary Jane as she sat on the edge of the lagoon and watched the row boats and the electric launches gliding about on the water. “I liked those swans at Lincoln Park.”

“I was just thinking to-day,” said Mr. Merrill, “we haven’t seen all the parks and I promised you, that you should see them—all the big ones anyway. I wonder when we could go, mother?”

“I wonder how we could go,” said Mrs. Merrill, “the parks are so far apart that a journey through them all would be a hopeless task, seems to me.”

“Depends on how you do it,” laughed Mr. Merrill. “I’ll tell you what I thought. I’ll take the whole day away from the office so as to go along. We’ll start fairly early and take the elevated out to Garfield Park—you know we promised the girls a trip on the elevated and we’ve always taken the train! We’ll see that park well, you know it has gardens and greenhouses and lakes, and then we’ll get a taxi and go to two or three other parks and ride home.”

The girls thought that was a wonderful plan and they wanted to set the day for that very same week. So Thursday was decided upon.

“Now there’s one thing besides getting a good lunch ready that I want you folks to do,” said Mr. Merrill as they picked up their baskets and balls ready to go home, “I want you to get out that map of Chicago we had on the train the day we came up here and find just where Garfield Park is and how we get there and how many interesting sights like rivers and parks and boulevards we pass on the way.” And of course the girls promised that they would find the map and get all that information first thing in the morning.

Riding on the elevated proved to be great fun. Mary Jane was afraid for a few minutes she wasn’t going to like it—the stairs were so very high up with holes in each step to see down to the ground; and the train dashed to the platform with such a roar and bustle and people crowded on and jerk! the train rushed off. But when she settled down in the seat, comfortingly near her mother, and looked out over the roofs of houses and stores, and down long streets, one after another, she found she wasn’t a bit afraid and that she liked it very much. She liked watching for children on folks’ back porches. Some played on the porch and some played in the dining-room windows—it was easy to tell which were the dining-room windows because always there were three big windows and always she could look right through the curtains and see the big table in the middle of the room. The only trouble with watching folks from an elevated was that the train dashed by so quickly she couldn’t any more than see, till—flash, flash, and they were gone and there was another street and another set of back stairs and some different children playing. It really was awfully queer.

Pretty soon they reached the big down town and there they got off their train, climbed over a big bridge to another elevated train and away they went whizzing again. It certainly was a queer way to travel, Mary Jane thought.

But finally father announced that they had come to Garfield Park, so they got off, walked down the stairs to a park that looked so much like their own park that Mary Jane had to rub her eyes and look twice to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Here were the same winding driveways, beautiful trees and small lakes.

“Did we come back to our Park?” she asked in surprise.

“Oh, no,” answered Alice who had run on a little ahead, “look at the big greenhouse and look back there! Now don’t you see the swans?”

No, it wasn’t their own neighborhood park, Mary Jane soon realized that, because there were many new things to be seen. The wonderful tropical greenhouse where palms and bananas and wonderful ferns such as the girls had seen in Florida were growing. And then there were beautiful out of door gardens—Mary Jane liked those even better than the greenhouse gardens, wonderful as those were. She seemed to feel, someway, as though the flowers must like the out of doors better.

Right in the middle of the many lovely flower beds in the out of doors gardens, there was a lily pool in which grew water lilies of all colors and sorts. Mary Jane had never seen water lilies before and she thought them very lovely—and rather queer too, if the truth must be told. She decided she would stay right there a while and let Alice and her father explore the rest of the gardens—they wanted to know names of flowers and names didn’t seem a bit interesting to the little girl.

Just after she had decided to stay there and play, she spied a boy of about her age who was watching the lilies too.

“Can you walk all the way around the edge?” he asked her.

“Edge of what?” asked Mary Jane.

“The edge of the pool,” he replied, “see,” and he put his foot up on the stone rim of the pool, “all the way around on this.”

“Can you?” asked Mary Jane. She wanted to see what he would say before she answered his question.

“Sure!” he replied, “it’s just as easy! Only girls are ’fraidies.”

“I guess I’m not,” declared Mary Jane firmly, “watch!” She stepped up on the stone rim—it was about eight inches wide—and walked boldly along toward the middle of the long side of the pool.

“You can, can’t you,” said the boy admiringly.

“Just as easy,” replied Mary Jane, for when she found she could do what he had asked she was anxious to have it appear to be as easy for her as for him.

“Come on,” the boy suggested, “let’s race!”

“Race?” asked Mary Jane, “how?”

“’Round the pool. You start this way, and I’ll start that way and the one that gets around home first beats.”

“All right,” agreed Mary Jane, “let’s.”

Now before Mary Jane saw the boy by the pool, Mrs. Merrill spied some very beautiful grasses over at one side of the gardens; the very sort of grasses, she decided, that Mary Jane’s grandmother would like to use in her flower beds by the driveways. And of course she wanted to find out the names of the grasses so she could write to grandmother about them. Seeing that Mary Jane was so absorbed in the pool and the lilies, she slipped over to look at the name sign which she knew would be stuck right by the roots. She jotted the name down in her note book, looked along at a few others and—turned back to the pool just in time to see her small daughter and a strange boy run racingly along the rim of the pool straight at each other.

“Mary Jane! Mary Jane!” she called, “jump down onto the ground! Jump down!”

Whether Mary Jane heard her and became confused, or whether the boy’s bumping into her made her lose her balance, nobody ever quite found out. But anyway, right before Mrs. Merrill’s astonished eyes, Mary Jane Merrill tumbled ’kplump—into the lily pool!

Fortunately the lily pool wasn’t very deep so Mary Jane didn’t fall far. But she did hit the bottom pretty hard; so hard that when she bobbed up, her head out of water and her feet on the bottom, she hardly knew what had happened to her.

Mrs. Merrill screamed and Mr. Merrill, Alice, three policemen and about twenty other people came running to see what had happened. It wasn’t necessary for anybody to jump in and make a triumphant rescue for Mary Jane was so close to shore that Mrs. Merrill had taken firm hold of her hand and pulled her out just as all the folks got there. So there was nothing for them to do but to stare and to ask questions.

“How did she do it?” asked the first policeman.

“Hurt you any?” asked the second.

“You and your mother come with me,” said the third (and Mary Jane guessed right away from his voice that he must have some little girls of his own), “and I’ll show you where you can dry your clothes.”

The procession of policemen and onlookers, led by a very wet and greatly embarrassed little girl, crossed the gardens, crossed the street and went into a comfortable big building. There a kindly matron produced a big bathrobe in which Mary Jane sat while her dress was wrung out and dried. And wasn’t she glad there was a good hot sun so things could dry quickly!

Finally, when Mary Jane was beginning to get awfully hungry, mother announced that the clothes were dry and that she had pulled and stretched them the best she could in the place of ironing. So Mary Jane dressed and they went in search of Alice and her father.

“Well, you certainly do mix up baths with your picnics,” laughed Mr. Merrill when he saw them coming. “Remember the time you fell into Clearwater, Pussy?”

“But it isn’t so bad, really, Dadah,” said Mary Jane, “and I’m not wet now.”

“So you’re not,” said Mr. Merrill, “but I am hungry—anybody agree with me?”

They all admitted to being nearly starved, so they found a pretty, grassy spot close by the lake on which several beautiful swans were sunning themselves, and there they spread out the luncheon they had brought. At first the girls were so hungry they didn’t want to do anything but eat. But by the time they had eaten a plateful of potato salad and three or four sandwiches, the swans discovered their lunching place and came to call. Evidently swans were used to being treated very nicely by folks who came to the park for they didn’t seem to have a trace of fear of strangers.

The girls tossed the crusts of the sandwiches to the edge of the water and the swans bent their long necks and picked them up and ate them, every crust, so daintily just as though crusts were a diet fit for kings—and swans. The swans didn’t actually come out of the water, but they came so close to the shore that the girls could almost touch them and they soon got to feeling very well acquainted.

So it was with some regret that they heard Mr. Merrill say, “Well, girls, weren’t we to see some of the other parks too?” And here it was four o’clock!

The basket was packed—and there wasn’t a scrap of anything a swan could eat, you may be sure of that—and they strolled down to the roadway. In a minute or two Mr. Merrill hailed a passing taxi and they settled themselves for a nice long ride.

They didn’t stop at any other park; Mary Jane was sure no other could be as interesting as the one where she had had such exciting experiences and Alice was quite as content as her father and mother to sit back, cool and comfortable, and see the beautiful flowers and shrubbery slip past them. So they rode and rode through one park after another, it seemed, till suddenly Mary Jane spied something that looked familiar.

“That’s my Midway!” she announced, as the car turned into the long, broad stretch of parkway near their own home.

“Sure enough it is!” exclaimed Mr. Merrill in pretended amazement, “we’ll have to turn around and go back!”

“No we won’t,” said Mary Jane, “we’ll go home.”

So they went on home, just in time to cook a good warm dinner and to talk over and over again the many things they had seen in the parks.