And now we come to an episode of the highest importance to five young misses of Laurel Grove. General Townsend owned an unoccupied house about two miles from town, at the foot of a steep hill called Old Bluff; and it had occurred to the active mind of Mary Gray that this would be a fine place for “camping out.”

It was April when she hinted this to Fanny Townsend, but it was May before Fanny spoke of it to her father.

“I’m waiting till some time when you come to my house to tea, Dandelina; and we mustn’t get to laughing, now you remember.”

Mary seated herself at the Townsend tea-table one evening with nervous dread; for, next to Mrs. Prim, Mrs. Townsend inspired her with more awe than any other lady in town. When she thought it time for Fanny to speak, she touched her foot under the table, and Fanny began.

“Papa, I have something to say.”

Fanny had the feeling that she was not highly reverenced by her family, on account of her unfortunate habit of giggling; but her face was serious enough now. “Papa, may we girls go down to the farm next summer,—to that house with the roses ’round it,—and camp out? The girls all want to, and we—we’re going to call it Camp Comfort.” (The reader will perceive that this explains the letters “C. C.”) She was sorry next moment that she had spoken, for her mother said, just as she had feared she might, “What will you think of next, Fanny?”

But her father seemed only amused. “Camp out? We girls? How many may ye be? And who? Going to take your servants?”

“You’ll each need a watch-dog,” suggested Fanny’s elder brother, Jack.

“You’ll come home nights, I presume,—servants, watch-dogs and all,” said her father.

“O no, indeed! It wouldn’t be camping out if we came home nights! And nobody has a dog but Fanny, and we shouldn’t want any servants,” cried Mary Gray, whose views of labor seemed to have changed materially.

“We intend to do our own work,” remarked Fanny. Whereupon everybody laughed; and General Townsend asked again who the girls were? “Oh, Flaxie Frizzle and Blanche Jones and I, papa; that makes three, rather young; and then Sadie Patten and Lucy Abbott, they’re rather old; that makes five. Sadie and Lucy will be the mothers,—I mean if you let us go.”

“That ‘if’ is well put in,” said brother Jack.

“But what will you do for a stove?” asked General Townsend, wishing to hear their plans, “there’s none in the house.”

“My mamma has a rusty stove, and our Henry Mann could take it to Old Bluff,” replied Mary.

“But there’s no furniture,—not a chair or a table.”

“They have too many chairs at Major Patten’s and Mr. Jones’s; their houses are running over with chairs.”

“Well, what about dishes?”

“Why, papa,” said Fanny eagerly, “only think what lots of dishes we have, just oceans, all broken to pieces!”

“Ah, shall you eat from broken dishes?” asked Mrs. Townsend coolly. “And perhaps you’ll sleep on the floor?”

“O no, Mrs. Townsend, our house is full of beds! Mamma has some of them put in the stable, and Blanche Jones’s house is full of beds, and they have to keep some of them in the attic. Everybody has everything; we’ve talked it all over. And there’s our big express wagon, and our Henry Mann to drive.”

Mary paused for breath.

“Yes, papa, Dr. Gray’s express wagon is very large; and we have a push-cart, you know. So can’t we go?” coaxed Fanny, true to first principles.

“What have I to do about it, little Miss Townsend? It seems you have already made your plans and invited your guests. How happened you to think to ask my permission for the rent of the house.”

“Finish your supper, Frances, and do not sit there with your bread in the air,” said Mrs. Townsend in a decided tone. “You forget that I am to be consulted as well as your father. And that’s not all. I’ve no idea that Dr. Gray, or Major Patten, or Mr. Jones, or Mrs. Abbott will consent to this camping out, as you call it; so you must not set your hearts on it, you and Flaxie.”

But it chanced that every one of the parents did consent at last; and one morning in the latter part of June you might have seen some very busy girls loading a push-cart and an express wagon, with the help of their brothers and Henry Mann, while Fanny laughed almost continually, and Mary Gray exclaimed at intervals,—

“O won’t it be a state of bliss?”

There were four bedsteads, eight chairs, one old sofa, one table, one rusty stove, a variety of old dishes,—not broken ones,—beside a vast amount of rubbish, which the mothers thought quite useless, but which the daughters assured them would be “just the thing for our charades.”

“I’m not going to Old Bluff to assist in such performances as charades, so you may just count me out,” said Preston, who was to take turns with Bert Abbott in being a nightly guest at Camp Comfort; since the parents would not consent that the girls should spend one night there alone.

“As if boys were the least protection,” said Lucy Abbott, Preston’s cousin.

“Still they may be useful in getting up games,” returned Sadie Patten hopefully. “And Jack Townsend’s cornet is charming.”

“So it is; it goes so well with your harmonica. And we’ll make the boys stir the ice cream,” said Lucy, the head housekeeper.

There was an ice-house connected with their cottage, and ice cream was to be permitted on Sundays, and lemonade at pleasure.

“But where are the lemons?” said Mary, flying about in everybody’s way.

“Oh, we shall buy fresh lemons every morning of our grocer who comes to our door,” said Lucy grandly. “What I want to know is, if my hammock was packed?—Children, did you see three hammocks in that push-cart?—Boys, I hope you’ll hang up those hammocks before we get there! Don’t go racing now and spilling out things!—There, I don’t believe anybody thought to put in that spider,” added she anxiously, as the five girls had bidden good-by to their families in the cool of the morning, and were walking in a gay procession toward their house in the country.

Old Bluff was a steep, though not very high mountain on the Canada side, and if it is not gone, it stands there yet, hanging defiantly over the blue brook called the river Dee, and throwing its huge shadow from shore to shore.

Old Bluff is a stern, bareheaded peak, and few are the flowers that dare show their faces near it. It is chiefly the hardy wintergreen and disconsolate little sprigs of pine and spruce which huddle together along its sides.

At the foot of this famous bluff, on the New York side, stood General Townsend’s old-fashioned farm-house, a story and a half high, with a white picket fence around it, and a red barn at one side. The house many years ago had been white; and the panes of glass in the windows were not only very small, but weather-stained and streaked with rainbow hues. London Pride or “Bouncing Bet” grew near the broad front door-stone, together with a few bunches of southernwood, which Dr. Gray thought had a finer odor than any geranium. The front yard was grassy, and the fence lined with roses of various sorts.

It was the first summer for years that this pleasant old place had been vacant, and now it might be applied for any day; but meanwhile the five girls, called “the quintette,” and the three attendant cavaliers, called “the trio,” were welcome to rusticate in it, and call it a “camp” if they chose.

After the furniture was set up, and there had been a reasonable amount of play at hide and seek in the barn, and the first supper had been eaten—the tablecloth proving to be too small for the table—Mary went to one of the front “rainbow-windows” to watch for Preston.

“I mean to be a true woman.”

This was what she usually said to herself when resolved not to cry. But there was something lonesome in the thought of going to bed without kissing her mother.

“Nobody else feels as I do, and I wouldn’t mention it for anything; but I’d give one quarter of my pin money—one whole dollar—to see mamma and Ethel.”

She had supposed that in camping out all care would be left behind. Her mother had excused her from lessons and sewing, and she had looked for “a state of bliss;” but it is forever true—and Mary was beginning to find it so—that wherever we are, there is “something still to do and bear.”

Homesickness was a constitutional weakness with Mary, but she disdained the cowardice of running home; she would be a “true woman,” and crack walnuts to please Lucy.

“Well, this is a hard-working family,” said Preston, arriving presently in state on his bicycle, as Lucy and Sadie were engaged in putting the supper dishes in the kitchen cupboard.

“Yes, Mr. Gray; and we allow no idlers here. Please may I ask what ails our window shades, sir?”

The poor old green-cloth curtains were tearing away from the gentle clasp of Sadie Patten’s tack-nails, and leaning over from the tops of the windows as if already tired of the sun and wanting a little rest.

“Well, let’s see your hammer.”

“No, I’m using it, I’m a young lady now and do as I please,” cried Mary, springing up from the kitchen hearth, and scattering her walnuts broadcast, “catch me if you can.”

“Is that so? Well, then, now for a race from here to the sweet-apple tree. One, two, three, begin!” And Preston started off at the top of his speed, Mary just before him, her face aglow, her hair streaming in the wind. As she skimmed over the ground, shouting and laughing, she seemed for all the world like a little girl, and not in the least like a young lady. She was soon caught and obliged to surrender the hammer, whereupon Preston nailed the curtains neatly, and went whistling about the house, giving finishing touches here and there to the rickety furniture.

“O thank you. You’ve been a great help. Now, in return, you shall have a spring-bed to sleep on, the only one we have in the house,” said Lucy, with a mischievous glance at Sadie.

The spring-bed did not fit the bedstead, and the chances were that it might fall through in the night.

“You’re too tremendously kind, too self-sacrificing,” said Preston, suspecting at once that something was wrong.

But he had his revenge. The bedstead was extremely noisy, and the roguish youth, unable to sleep himself on account of mosquitoes, rejoiced to think that he was probably keeping his cousin Lucy awake.

“Good morning, Preston, I hope you rested well,” said she, as they all met next morning in the front yard.

“O very.—it’s so quiet in the country,” returned he demurely. “Did you ever hear anything so quiet?”

“Never; except possibly a saw-mill,” said Sadie Patten. “Lucy and I wondered if you could be alive, you were so still!”

“It was sort of frightful. No sound broke the awful silence, save the warning voice of the mosquito.—By the way, girls, why don’t you call this spot Mosquito Ranch?”

“I’ll tell you what we used to call it at our house,—we always called it ‘Down to the Farm,’” remarked little Fanny.

“It ought to be Rose Villa,” said Lucy. “Just see our rose-tree that reaches almost to the eaves. We measured it yesterday, and it’s seven feet high.”

“That will do for a tree,” said Preston, plucking one of the pure, white roses and thrusting it into his button-hole; “but you can’t eat roses, you know.”

He had built a fire in the kitchen stove, but the young ladies seemed to have forgotten entirely that there was such a thing in the world as breakfast.

“O, yes, we must prepare our simple morning meal,” said cousin Lucy. “Girls, where’s my blue-checked apron? Preston, we’ve heard there are lovely trout in that brook across the field. Not the river-brook.”

“Have you, really? Then I go a-fishing; I’d rather do that than starve.—No, Fan, you needn’t come, I won’t have anybody with me but Flaxie.”

Very proud was Mary that she could be trusted to keep silence in the presence of the wise and wary trout. It was beautiful there by the brook-side, in the still June morning, sitting and watching the “shadowy water, with a sweet south wind blowing over it.” There was no house within half a mile, and perhaps the Peck family and the Brown family—the nearest neighbors—were still asleep, for there was no sound, except the “song-talk” of the birds, and the whisper of the wind through the trees. It was a very light whisper, reminding Preston of the words,—

Mary’s breath was a “noiseless noise,” too; it hardly stirred the folds of her buff print dress; it was the very “sigh” of “silence,” and Preston thought he should tell her so, and praise her when they got home; but it happened that he forgot it.

The trout came, as they usually did when he called for them; but it must be confessed that they were never eaten. Lucy put them in the spider, Sadie salted, Fanny turned, and finally Blanche Jones burned them. The “morning meal” was as “simple” as need be, with cold bread and butter, cold tongue, and muddy, creamless coffee, the milk having turned sour. In the midst of their repast, the young campers were surprised by a loud peal of the door-bell.