Dorothy Dales Camping Days | Page 9

from Tavia's corner, and without further ceremony Dorothy was lifted bodily up on the table and compelled to make a speech. It was a dangerous, undertaking, for the sofa pillows that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere put in so much punctuation that the address might have been put down as a series of stops. However, Dorothy did manage to say something, for which effort she was roundly applauded.
The night bell called them to the sense of school duties still unfinished.
"Oh, that old bell!" complained Nita, pouting.
Cologne drew Dorothy over in the corner. "Ask Tavia about the man on the horse," she whispered. "She got a letter from him!"
CHAPTER IV
THE PREMATURE CAMP
After all, the last days of school came and went, and the Glenwood girls had started off for their respective homes before Dorothy had a chance to fully realize that the vacation had really begun, and that each day of that delightful calendar now seemed suspended from the very skies, illumined with the prospects of the very best of good times.
Dorothy had promised to spend a greater part of the summer with Rose-Mary Markin at the Markin summer place, a delightful spot on Lake Monadic in Maine. This plan was particularly fortunate, as Mrs. Winthrop White, Dorothy's Aunt Winnie, with whom the Dales had lately made their home, was to go abroad, while Ned and Nat, Dorothy's cousins, had arranged such a varied itinerary for their summer sports, that one might imagine, to hear the schedule, that the particular summer involved must have been of the brand which has neither night nor autumn to mark its limits.
Then Major Dale, and Dorothy's brothers, Joe and Roger, were to take a long-promised cruise on the St. Lawrence, so that Dorothy was quite at liberty to plan for herself.
But these plans could never interfere with a visit to the Cedars, the White's summer home, and here, on the afternoon of which we write, Dorothy found herself at last surrounded by her family, and submerged in their joyous welcome.
"Roger, how you have grown!" she kept saying as her eyes, time after time, sought out the "baby" brother of whom Dorothy was so fond. "And Joe! Why, you are getting to look so much like Nat----"
"Here, now! No knocking!" called out the jolly Nat. "I don't want to be handsome, but I simply refuse to look ten years younger!" This last was said in imitation of the "lady-like way" girls are supposed to have in expressing their compliments.
"And me?" asked Ned, pulling himself up out of his high-enough height before his cousin. "What is the verdict? Am I not--ahem--stunning?"
"You are big enough, that's sure," admitted Dorothy, giving him a look of unstinted admiration, "and as to being stunning--I just imagine that you are even that--in your golf suit."
"There now!" and Nat went off into kinks; "he has to wear knickers to look cute. You ought to see me in my football togs if you want to behold something really magnificent."
"Here, here!" called out Major Dale. "When I was a lad it was considered a crime to keep a mirror in one's room. We used to keep one blind shut to get a reflection on the window pane for the neck-tie business, and we took a chance at the hair-part. But to hear you young ones! What you actually need, boys, is a little of the real thing in training. Why don't you pitch a tent out on your own river here, and go in for roughing it?"
"Great!" declared the boys' chorus.
"Now that's something like," continued Nat, "and it would do a lot toward patching up a fellow's finances. Let's see. Where's that itinerary? Suppose we make it two weeks at home--on the co-operative."
Like the proverbial wildfire, the suggestion spread, until within a short hour the boys, with Dorothy, were out on the river edge, selecting the spot upon which to pitch the "War Tent"--for war they declared it would be, "against masculine beauties." Dorothy found herself so busy planning the boys suits, figuring out what they would require in the way of supplies and furniture, though this last was to be cut down to mere necessities, that she almost felt her own camping days had begun, as Nat expressed it.
"Now that comes of having a girl around," declared Ned. "If you had not come, Dorothy, we would never have had that admiration conference, and then we could never have discovered our own beautiful river, for in this case, I don't mind using a correct, and all right adjective, although usually I consider anything adjectivey rather too much of a spread."
He sauntered once more to the river's brink, where a short distance down stream could be seen the Lebanon, the family rowboat. Surely the place did warrant the boy extravagant use of "a correct