PERSONALLY CONDUCTED
JAMES pulled off his cap as the girls bowed to him.
"Did you know this was the Bishop's house you're in front of?" he
whispered, glancing up at the veranda to make sure that he was not
overheard.
"Which is the house, the wooden part or the tent?" asked Ethel Brown.
"When he first came here forty years ago there were only one or two
houses and for a summer or two everybody lived in tents."
"What fun!" cried Ethel Blue.
"The seasons weren't very long then, only two weeks, so nobody minded if
things weren't very comfortable. The Bishop and Mr. Miller had these
combination arrangements built because they had lots of guests and
needed larger places."
"I wonder if there are any people here now who came that first summer?"
"Yes, indeed, my father was here then. He was a little kid in skirts."
"Naturally he doesn't remember anything about it."
"No, but my grandmother brought him and she often tells me about it. You
just wait till Old First Night. There are often twenty people who stand
up when they ask how many present were here at the first session. The
Chancellor, that's Bishop Vincent, was here, of course, and his son,
he's the president now, and the Executive Secretary of the C.L.S.C.--"
"That's Miss Kimball. We know her. We just met her," and they told their
new friend all about it.
"You're sure in luck," was his comment.
"Old First Night is the anniversary of the very first meeting, I
suppose."
"Just you wait and see," hinted James promisingly. "Grandmother thinks
it's the most interesting thing that happens all summer."
"How long have we got to wait?" asked Ethel Blue who liked to have
things happen right off.
"Till the first Tuesday in August."
"That won't be for a long time. Isn't anything interesting going to
happen before then?"
"Oodles of things. Next week all the clubs begin and a little later
there'll be a pageant, and the Spelling Match is great."
"Why?" questioned Ethel Blue in a doubtful tone that made the others
smile.
"You can see what Ethel Blue thinks about spelling," laughed Helen. "Why
is it such good fun?"
"Oh, it's fun to see the grown-up people trying it just as if they were
kids. They don't let anybody under fifteen go in. Mr. Vincent, the
president, says young people are 'such uncomfortably good spellers.'"
"Ethel Blue wouldn't agree with him."
"It's true, though, because when you're in school you're getting
practice every day, and the grown-up people don't get so much practice.
They look up words in the dictionary instead of remembering the right
way to spell them."
"It must be funny to see grown-up people fail, but I suppose they give
them the hardest words there are."
"They take the words out of the Home Reading Course books for the next
year. Miss Kimball told you about the Home Reading Course, didn't she?"
"Oh, we knew before," the girls all cried in chorus. "Our grandmother is
a graduate."
"And Aunt Marion is in this year's class."
"And so is Grandfather."
"My father is, too," said James. "He's a doctor, you know, and he says
that if he didn't read that he wouldn't know anything but bones and
fevers."
"What does he mean?" asked Ethel Brown, who liked to have everything
perfectly clear.
"He means he wouldn't read anything but his medical journals and he'd
'go stale.'"
"Is your father coming on Recognition Day?"
"He's coming if nobody has a smashed head or smallpox just at the wrong
time. He says he wouldn't miss it for anything. The Recognition Day
procession marches along this path we're on."
"When will Recognition Day be?" asked Ethel Brown.
"The middle of August."
Ethel Blue groaned.
"Everything is so far off!" she exclaimed.
"Here's the hotel--the Hotel Athenaeum," and James nodded toward a large
building with a tower and with a veranda on which guests were sitting
looking out upon the lake.
"The band concerts are right here all summer. The band plays up on the
hotel piazza and the people walk around below here and sit on the grass.
It looks pretty when the girls have on pretty dresses."
"Are there lots of girls here?" asked Helen.
"About five million," returned James cheerfully. "I've got a sister
who's going over to call on you as soon as she sees you on your porch.
That's the only way people can make calls here. Everybody's out all the
time going to lectures and classes so you have to catch them when you
see them."
"You're neighbors so we'll see her right off," said Helen hopefully.
"What's this building?"
"This is the Arcade. There are some shops in it and doctors and things.
The women all learn to embroider here--see, round this corner on the
piazza is where the teacher stays. Mother goes there all the time, and
my married sister. You know they joke at Chautauqua women for
embroidering right through lectures and concerts. Somebody wrote some
rhymes about it once."
"Let's have them."
"I never fail to oblige when I'm asked for them. Listen. It's dedicated
'To the Wool-Gatherers.'
"I don't go out on Sundays
At Chautauqua, for you see
To just set still and listen,
Are the hardest things that be.
"At 'Devotional' 'tis different,
There my crochet-work I take,
The one-two-three, skip-two, do-one,
Just keeps me wide awake.
"I haint heard much the preacher said
To-day,--I dropped a stitch--
But 'twas splendid, and I think
'Twas on the duties of the rich.
"With lectures, sermons, concerts,
And all such things as that,
'Tis nice to think they culture me
While I set there and tat.
"All hail to old Chautauqua,
I'll carry off this year,
Some thirty yards of edging,
To prove that I was here."
"Right here on this open space is where they used to have the lectures
forty years ago," James went on, somewhat abashed by the applause he
received. "It's called Miller Park now."
"What became of the hall?"
"There never was any hall. There was a raised platform and the people
sat in front of it and when it rained they had to put up their
umbrellas."
"The trees have grown since, I suppose."
"There were trees there then, but they thinned them out to make room.
The first houses were built around the edge of the open place. Those
over there are some of the original articles."
The girls saw a row of small cottages rising side by side, their porches
almost touching.
"They aren't bad looking," said James patronizingly, "but the
Institution doesn't allow houses to be built so close together now."
"Why not?"
"They say that there's no reason why a cottage shouldn't be as good
looking on a small scale as a big house and no house can look its best
if it's jammed up into another one's lap, so now they require people to
leave some land around them."
They had crossed Miller Park and passed between two houses to a walk
that ran along the lakeside.
"Here's our house, right here," said James, "and there's Margaret on the
porch now."
"And Dorothy," cried the Ethels together.
Margaret Hancock ran down the steps at her brother's call and asked her
new friends to stay a while.
"If you don't mind making the first call," she laughed.
She was a clear-eyed girl, not as pretty as Helen, but with a frank
expression that was pleasant to see. "Nobody stands on ceremony at
Chautauqua," she went on, "and if you want to see anybody you've got to
seize her right where you find her."
They all laughed, for she had used almost the same words as her brother.
"You see how the Hancock family holds together," said James.
"This is Dorothy Smith."
Margaret introduced the young girl on the porch to Helen, for she was
already speaking to the Ethels.
"Helen, Helen," they cried, "this is our friend Dorothy we told you
about."
Helen looked with interest at the girl who had seemed to know all about
Chautauqua as her new acquaintances reported her conversation. She saw a
girl about the age of the Ethels but not so tall and lacking in their
appearance of vigor. Otherwise she was not unlike them, for she had
curly brown hair and her nose was just the least bit "puggy," to use
Roger's descriptive word. Her eyes, however, were unlike either Ethels',
for they were gray. She had easy manners with a pretty touch of shyness
that seemed to Helen quite remarkable since she had travelled all over
the United States.
"I wouldn't miss the Girls' Club for anything," she was saying. "I
learned how to make lots of things there last summer, and at Christmas
time I sold enough to pay my club fee this year, and more too."
Helen looked at her with renewed interest. Here was a girl two years
younger than she and she was earning money to pay for her pleasures this
summer. It gave her something to think about.
"You and I must join the Young Women's Vacation Club," said Margaret to
Helen. "They say they are going to have picnics and plays and great fun.
It's a new club."
"I certainly shall. What kinds of things did you learn to make?" Helen
asked Dorothy.
"I put almost all my time on baskets. Mother said she thought it was
better to learn how to do one thing very well than to do a lot of
things just middling well; so I learned how to make ten different kinds
of baskets and trays."
"All different shapes?"
"Different materials, too; wicker and splints and rushes and some pretty
grasses that I found across the lake one afternoon when Mother and I
went over to Maple Springs on the steamer."
"I know they were beauties," said Helen heartily.
"They were," confirmed Margaret. "I saw some of them. I thought the
prettiest of all was that small tray made of pine needles."
"Pine needles!" exclaimed James. "How could you work with them? I should
think they'd come bristling out all the time."
"They were needles from the long-leaved pine that grows in the South. I
got them in North Carolina when Mother and I were there the winter
before."
"And you sold a lot of them?" ventured Helen, who was not quite sure
that it was polite to ask such a question but who was eager to know just
how Dorothy had managed.
"It was easy," explained Dorothy simply. "Mother and I were in a town in
Illinois last winter. Mother was teaching embroidery in an art store, so
she got acquainted with the ladies who were getting up a bazar at
Christmas time and they let me sell my things there on commission."
"On commission? What's that?" asked Ethel Blue to Helen's relief, for
she did not like to acknowledge that she did not know.
"On commission? Why, I made a table full of baskets and when they sold
them they kept one-tenth of the price for their commission. It was like
paying rent for the table you see and a salary to a clerk to sell it.
That's the way Mother explained it to me," ended Dorothy rather shyly,
for James was staring at her with astonishment that a girl and not a
very old girl either should know as much as that about business.
"Hullo, here comes Roger," he exclaimed. "Let's hear what he's been up
to," and he left the porch by his usual method--over the rail--and
joined his new friend before he reached the house. As they strolled off
the girls heard scraps of conversation about "baseball," "first and
second crew" and "sailing match."
"Are you all going to the Amphitheatre this evening?" asked Margaret as
the Mortons prepared to leave.
"I think Mother will let us go to-night because it's our first night and
we're crazy to see everything," replied Ethel Brown, "but she says we've
got to go to bed early here just as we do at home or else we'll get thin
instead of fat this summer."
"Mother lets me go whenever there are pictures," said Margaret. "Often
there are splendid travel lectures that are illustrated. I love those.
And once in a while I go to a concert in the evening, but usually I go
to the afternoon concerts instead."
"Do you suppose we'll ever be big enough to go to bed just as late as we
want to?" Ethel Blue asked Helen as they went up the steps of their own
house.
"Even Roger doesn't do that. I remember Father's telling me once that he
used to growl about going to bed early when he was a boy and that when
the time finally came when he could go to bed as late as he liked he
didn't care anything about it and used to go early half the time."
"I don't believe I shall be that way," sighed Ethel. "How queer grown
people are!"
But since they had these curious and insistent ideas about the need of
repose she eagerly took advantage of any break in the routine such as
was offered by the chance to go to the Amphitheatre that evening. It was
a wonderful sight, the immense open building, the glittering organ, the
brilliant electric lights, and, facing the thousands of people that made
up the audience, a slender woman with a marvellously rich voice, who
sang negro melodies and told negro stories that brought laughter and
tears.
After the recital was over the whole audience went to the lakeside, and
there watched the lighting of the signal fires that for years have
flashed to the country around the news that another Assembly has opened.
Higher and higher the flames roared at different points along the shore.
Point Chautauqua, across the water, saw the beacon and flashed on the
news down the lake until fires far beyond the sight of the people on the
Assembly grounds told their story to the dwellers near-by and the glare
of the sky passed it farther afield.
"Isn't it just too wonderful," whispered Ethel Blue to Ethel Brown, and
Ethel Brown answered, "I can't believe we're really here."