“It was a nice party!” sighed Winona, for the tenth time, next day.

“It was,” admitted Tom. “I enjoyed it myself. Also the eats were good. Very clever of us to give a party like that. The question is, if you girls had to manage a real meal what would happen?”

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” said Winona. “This very afternoon, at Mrs. Bryan’s!”

“Oh, can’t I go?” clamored Florence.

“Well, it’s just Helen and Louise and Adelaide Hughes and I,” Winona hesitated. “It’s the maid’s day out, and we’re going to get the supper and clear it away. Four of the others are going to do it a day or so later. And we’re all going to try to get the same supper at our own houses, the next night.”

“Then of course I want to go!” said Florence, “so I can get the same supper at home the next night.”

Still Winona hesitated. It certainly is a nuisance to have a small sister who wants to tag, when you are just starting off to have a particularly nice time with your most intimate friends. And to add to the charm of the situation, just then in rushed Puppums through the back door, and seeing Winona with her hat in her hand, promptly sat up and began to beg wildly. Winona began to laugh.

“Oh, come on, then, the whole family!” she said.

Florence and Puppums both yelped for joy.

“Shall I send Tom over to bring you back this evening?” asked Winona’s mother, who was sitting near.

“Oh, no—it isn’t far,” said Winona, “and it won’t be late when I get back. Besides, I’ll have Florence and the doggie.”

“Very well,” said her mother. “And don’t try to cook things that are too gorgeous, my dear, because we haven’t as much money as the Bryans, and it might turn out to be very expensive.”

“I’ll remember,” said Winona, starting off with her little sister beside her, and Puppums careering wildly about them both. But it was one of the things that never did worry the Merriams, whether or not they had as much money as their neighbors. The three children and the dog, as their friends said, “always did seem to be having such a good time!” They were handsome and light-hearted—that is, the children were. Puppums was more remarkable for brains than beauty, as Tom said; being part pug, part bull-terrier and part fox-terrier, with a dash of retriever suspected in his remote ancestry. However, as long as he had his own way and plenty of bones and enough laps to sit on, neither his looks nor anything else worried the Puppums dog. His family had intended to give him a very fine name, but as Puppums he started when he was a small, wriggling mongrel-baby, and to nothing but Puppums would he ever deign to answer. So the family made the best of it. It was a way they had, anyway.

Florence began to career around her sister very much as the dog was doing, singing at the top of her voice meanwhile. So, as Winona did not have to talk, she began to think. What her mother had said about their not having so much money as the Bryans set her to wondering, not about herself, but about Adelaide Hughes. She had noticed that Mrs. Bryan seemed to want Adelaide to make friends with the other girls, and that Adelaide herself was very apt to leave the first advances to them. And the reason, she supposed, was that Adelaide felt she was too poor to keep up with them, or so Tom had said.

“But I don’t ever feel as if I had to keep up with Helen, and she has twice as many dresses and twice as much money to spend as I have,” meditated Winona. “I wonder if I could ask Adelaide about it without hurting her feelings. I will if I get the chance.”

About this time Winona and her caravan reached the Bryan house, and Florence ran ahead so quickly to ring the bell that Winona had to run, too, to be there when the door opened.

“I’ve brought my family, Mrs. Bryan!” said Winona. “I hadn’t any choice—they simply would come. It’s really your fault for being so popular with them.”

“Your family’s very welcome!” said Mrs. Bryan. “If it’s willing to be useful. What about it, Florence,—will you run errands for us if we want you to?”

“Course I will!” said Florence, flinging herself bodily on Mrs. Bryan and hugging her hard. “I want to work!”

“Puppums wants to help, too,” said Helen.

“Well, you can’t help that way, you little villain,” said Louise, appearing aproned in the doorway and making a dash for the dog. He had his paws on the table, and was most ill-manneredly trying to find out what was wrapped up in the paper with the lovely meaty smell. Louise rescued the package, and carried it out to the kitchen.

“Is everyone here?” asked Mrs. Bryan. “No, I miss Adelaide.”

“She’s just coming now,” said Helen from the living-room window. “I wonder if she’s remembered to bring her apron?”

“Oh,” cried Winona, “I never brought mine!”

“I’ll go get it,” said Florence. “You see, you need me already!”

She flew off, with the dog at her heels.

“Truly, I’m sorry, Mrs. Bryan,” apologized Winona again, “but she would have felt so badly if I hadn’t let her come!”

“You ought to sit on her more,” suggested Louise, popping her head out of the kitchen door again. “I do on mine.”

“Well, you have such a lot of brothers and sisters you have to,” said Winona, for Louise was the oldest of six.

“Bessie wanted to come,” said Louise, “but I put my foot down.”

“On Bessie?” laughed Winona, as she ran to open the door for Adelaide. “I hope you didn’t hurt her.”

“Did you bring your apron, Adelaide?” called Helen anxiously.

“There! She’s asked every one of us that question in turn,” said Louise, coming out into the living-room for the fourth time in five minutes. “I do hope you did!”

“Oh, yes, I did,” said Adelaide. “I have it here under my arm.”

“And here’s Florence back with mine!” said Winona. “Now may we start?”

“It isn’t quite time yet,” said Mrs. Bryan. “If we plan for supper at six, one hour is a great plenty of time for supper-getting, especially with all of us at it. It’s only four-thirty now, and I want to tell you a plan I have. Come here, Florence. It’s about you and your friends.”

“Oh, a plan about me!” said Florence. “That is nice!”

“You see, girls,” went on Mrs. Bryan, “there are always little sisters or cousins of Camp Fire Girls, like Florence and Bessie and the rest, who want to play, too. They aren’t old enough to belong to Camp Fires of their own, so the way we do is to make them an annex to ours, under the name of Blue Birds—the Blue Bird stands for happiness, you know. And we help them, and show them how to have good times, too, and—they don’t have to tag any more.”

“I didn’t mean to tag,” said Florence, looking a little ashamed. “I just wanted to—to come, too!”

“Well, if you will go and find Bessie Lane, and—Adelaide, you have a little sister about their ages, haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Adelaide. “Frances is nine.”

“Well, Florence, get Bessie and Frances if you can find them, and we’ll discover something for our nest of Blue Birds to do.”

“I think it’s lovely, being a Blue Bird,” said Florence, very much impressed by belonging to a society of her own.

“Well, if you’re a bird, fly!” said Louise, giving her a little push.

The girls talked for a while longer, then donned their aprons and went out into the kitchen, where they stood and waited for further orders.

“There are four of you,” said their Guardian. “There’s the table to set, salad and dressing to make, meat and potatoes to prepare, and dessert. Cocoa and cake, too. You’re welcome to anything in the ice-box, but the game is to get supper without buying anything extra, unless something like bread or sugar gives out—some staple.”

“That will be more fun,” said Winona, who had had some experience lately with cooking. “It’s much more interesting thinking out ways to make things out of other things, than when you cook straight ahead!”

Adelaide stared as if Winona had said a very strange thing. But then Adelaide always did look at Winona more or less that way.

“I think the most fun is eating out of paper bags,” said Louise. “No washee dishee. However, I only think that—I wouldn’t dare say it. How’ll we divide?”

“Decide that yourselves,” said Mrs. Bryan.

“Let’s see what there is in the ice-box, first,” Winona suggested prudently, when Mrs. Bryan had left them alone. So they investigated.

“Eight large baked potatoes!” counted Louise. “How on earth did you miscalculate so badly as that, Helen, or are they there for our special benefit?”

“No, it just happened,” said Helen. “Father was going to bring a friend home to dinner last night, and neither of them could get here after all.”

There was also a large piece of cooked beefsteak, a head of lettuce, a dish of cooked peas and some beets. There were other things in the ice-box as well, but these were what the girls chose. They brought some apples up from down cellar, too, and stacked them in a row on the table with the other things.

“Now, Nannie said that the game was to use as many leftovers as possible and do everything as inexpensively as we could and yet have everything taste good and not seem warmed over,” said Helen.

“That’s something a lot of grown-up women never do,” said Louise. “My aunt——”

Mrs. Bryan came from the living-room to say. “I’ll show you anything you don’t know about, girls, but you must do the actual work yourselves, or you won’t know how.”

“Yes!” said Louise. “Choose your poison, Ladies and Gentlemen!” She pulled her cooking-cap close down over her hair. “I’m going to do the potatoes. I think I know how to fix them.”

“Cold baked potatoes?” said Helen. “There isn’t anything, except creaming them.”

“They’re all right that way,” said Louise, “but that isn’t what I’m going to do.”

“Well, I’ll take the cake,” said Helen. “I saw some sour milk in the ice-box, and spice-cake is the cheapest cake I know.”

“I’ll take the meat,” said Winona. “There must be something I can do with a beautiful piece of steak like that, even if it is cooked.”

Adelaide had not said anything.

“That leaves the salad for you, Adelaide,” said Mrs. Bryan cheerfully. “Louise, you’d better see about some fruit for supper, for your potatoes won’t take you long.”

Then Mrs. Bryan introduced them to the ways of the gas-range, and went back to lie in wait for her Blue Birds.

Helen collected spice and molasses and flour and shortening around her corner of the table, and went systematically to work on her spice-cake.

“It looks like gingerbread,” said Winona, getting the bread-crumb jar.

“It is, really, only it hasn’t much ginger in,” explained Helen. “Lots of people don’t like ginger. What are you going to do with your steak, Winnie?”

“Frame it!” advised Louise frivolously. “They say they have a four-pound steak under glass at the Metropolitan Museum, as a relic of the days when each family had at least one in a lifetime.”

“If you want to frame your share of it you may,” said Winona. “I’m going to eat mine.”

“They’re supposed to be eaten,” put in Helen mildly. “But really, Winnie, I think you have rather a hard job. There’s not nearly enough steak there for eight people. It was only intended for five in the first place.”

“That’s the game, isn’t it?” said Winona placidly. “Besides, I’m going to send Florence home to supper. It’s all right for her to attach herself to the party for the afternoon, but I draw the line at her inviting herself to a meal—don’t you think so, Louise?”

“I’m wid yez,” called Louise back from the gas-range, where she was doing something with sugar and water. “Bessie goes back, too.”

Winona got the chopping-machine, divided a big stalk of celery with Adelaide, made another excursion to the shelf over the ice-box for some peppers and onions, and began to grind her beefsteak.

“Croquettes?” inquired Louise curiously.

“No, scalloped meat,” answered Winona. “The croquettes won’t go as far, and there’ll be the cream gravy extra, and we’ll need milk for the cocoa. Besides, the deep fat to fry them would be another horrible extravagance.”

She put in a layer of meat as she spoke, then the ground celery and peppers and seasoning, and a generous layer of bread-crumbs.

“But aren’t celery and peppers an extravagance, too?” put in Adelaide, looking faintly interested. She was the only one of the four girls not busy. She had not started on her salad.

“They would be if they weren’t in the house,” said Winona carelessly, “though I don’t think they are costly this time of year. But I’m using them for their bulk. Mother flavors with celery seed when celery’s too high.”

She continued to build up her edifice of meat and crumbs and so forth, and finally drenched it with cold water and put it in the oven.

“Be careful of my cake when you look at your meat,” reminded Helen, coming and tucking her spice-cake in beside the meat as she spoke. “How are you getting on, Adelaide?”

“Not at all,” said Adelaide ashamedly. “I don’t believe I know how to make salads.”

“Come help me set the table, then,” invited Helen.

“All right,” said Adelaide, getting up slowly from her kitchen chair, and flinging her long, untidy braids back over her shoulders.

“No, Helen, please!” said Winona. “Let me show Adelaide. I think we can make a perfectly lovely salad in a few minutes.”

“All right, Winnie!” said Helen cheerfully, and vanished into the dining-room alone.

“I don’t see how!” said Adelaide. “I thought you had to have chicken or lobster or such things for salad—and I’m sure I’d curdle the dressing.”

“Of course you will if you expect to,” said Louise, setting her syrup on to boil, and beginning to pare and quarter apples and drop them in cold water so they wouldn’t brown. “Why don’t you make boiled dressing?”

“I didn’t know about it,” said Adelaide.

“Good gracious!” said Louise. “How on earth do you manage at your house?”

“Well, there’s just father and Lonny and France and I, and mostly father brings home things from the delicatessen. And sometimes we roast meat and just eat at it till it’s gone. I’m not old enough to know much about housekeeping, father says. But Lonny cooks sometimes.”

Winona and Louise both stared at her.

“I’d go crazy,” said Louise frankly. “I should think you’d get so you never wanted to eat anything.”

“Anyway, you can ‘try this on your piano’ when you go home,” Winona threw in hastily, giving Louise a furtive, if thorough, pinch as she passed her, for she had seen Adelaide color up. “Boiled dressing’s easy. You know how to make drawn butter, don’t you—white sauce?”

“Oh, yes,” said Adelaide, rising.

“Well,” explained Winona, “when you melt the butter in the pan to mix with the flour, you add some mustard, just a pinch, and salt and pepper. Then when you’ve put in the flour, and the milk, and it’s just going to thicken, you put in the yolk of an egg. When it’s cold you thin it with vinegar. That isn’t hard, is it?”

Adelaide was swiftly following directions as Winona talked.

“Thin the egg with milk, and beat it a little—that’s right,” said Winona. “There—now take it off. The egg only wants to cook a minute. Now all you have to do is wait till it cools and add the vinegar, and—there’s your dressing!”

“Why, it isn’t a bit hard!” said Adelaide wonderingly.

“Nor a bit expensive,” said Winona. “As for the salad, you can make salad out of any kind of vegetable that will cut up.”

“Let me see if I can work it out alone,” said Adelaide.

She washed the lettuce and set it on the individual salad plates Helen found for her. Then she began to combine peas and beets and celery quite as if she knew how.

Winona watched her for a minute, then went over to see what Louise was doing. While she had been helping Adelaide Louise’s syrup had cooked enough to have the quartered apples dropped into it, and now it was bubbling on the back of the stove. Just as Winona came over Louise took off the apples, cooked through, but not to the point of losing their shape, and put them outdoors to cool. Then she turned her attention to the baked potatoes of yesterday.

She had heated them through, and now she cut off the tops and scooped out the inside, and was mixing it with milk and butter and a little onion, and beating it till it was creamy.

“They’re harder to do than if they were fresh,” she said, pounding vigorously, “but I guess they’ll come out all right, when they’ve been browned a minute.”

“They’ll be browned just about the time my scalloped meat’s done,” responded Winona, dropping to her knees before the oven. “Oh, Helen, come take out your cake! It’s all done—I’ve tried it with a straw.”

“Oh, it isn’t burned, is it?” cried Helen, dashing in.

It wasn’t. She put it on the shelf over the range, to keep warm, and headed a party bound upstairs to tidy up.

“You didn’t set places for those little taggers?” called Louise to Helen on the way up.

“Not at our table,” said Helen.