A MIDSUMMER DAY’S DREAM
The Forest Festival came off a few days after Nanno had become an inmate
of Camp Huairarwee. The letters appealing for contributions had been
answered by the arrival of mysterious packages which kept the girls in
constant excitement; and on the eve of the great event two donations
from unexpected sources were handed in.
“Look what Leila Myra’s mother made for us!” said Jean, running up to
Carol and displaying a worsted disk crocheted in various inharmonious
shades of green, and adorned with a woolly border of loops.
“What on earth is it?” asked Carol.
“A lamp mat,” replied Jean. “Isn’t it _excruciating_! It sets my teeth
on edge! Oh, dear!” she laughed. “I nearly broke my shield of truth
trying to send a nice polite message of thanks. I _couldn’t_ say it was
pretty, but I said it was just right for the festival, because it was
green, like moss. That was true, I’m sure!”
“A lamp mat!” Carol repeated. “Lamp capsizer, I should say, with that
hummocky border! Let’s put it on the fern table and label it, ‘Moss from
the Penfield Farm.’”
Limpy herself had been deeply interested in the coming festival, little
suspecting for whom its proceeds were intended. When Jean and Cecily
paid her a call that afternoon she showed them a quaint little box,
covered with small fir-cones interspersed with acorns, and the whole
varnished over till it shone.
“It’s for the festival,” she said shyly. “Douglas made me the box an’
got the cones an’ acorns, an’ I put ’em on. Do you like it?” She looked
up anxiously. Jean and Cecily were able to pronounce the offering “too
dear for anything,” without risk to their golden shields, and Limpy
colored with pleasure at the compliments her handiwork received.
“A Midsummer Day’s Dream”—that was what Dr. Hamilton named the Forest
Festival, to which all the other campers on the lake and the guests from
Halcyon Inn came flocking the following afternoon, and from which they
went away laden with all sorts of woodland trophies. The visitors came
by boat and canoe; and when they had paid their admittance fees to
Douglas, who was stationed on the landing, the first hostesses to
welcome them to the forest fairy-land were two water-nymphs, who sat at
the entrance of a grotto, an inviting little nook in the rocks above the
beach. Both were crowned with wreaths of pond-lilies in full bloom, and
their bare necks and arms were adorned with chains and bracelets of lily
stems. Their hair flowed loose over their shoulders, and the nymph with
the long dark locks and the deep blue eyes wore a robe white as the foam
on the crest of a wave; while her sunny-haired, hazel-eyed sister was
all in sea-green, which surely meant that she had come up from the
waters of Huairarwee bay.
Jean and Cecily had taken nymph-hood on themselves, to serve orange and
raspberry ice and lemonade, and they kept these appropriately watery
delicacies in the cool depths of their grotto. Most beguiling lorelei
they proved themselves. Of the guests that they lured to their retreat
some returned a second, one or two even a third time, and every now and
then a white nymph or a green one would come flying up to the kitchen
(where Marie the cook and her daughters, Amelie and Toinette, were busy
over large freezers) and call “_More ice, please!_”
Two fairies, the Fern Fairy and the Fruit Fairy, held sway on the top of
the bank. Betty was the Fern Fairy; great plumy ferns covered her white
dress, and her rosy face smiled at her customers from under a wreath of
maidenhair. Before her was a rustic table covered with a bank of moss;
and set forth on the green counter were birch-bark ferneries, big and
little, filled with moss and ferns, with scarlet bunch-berries and
partridge-berries to give them a tinge of brightness. Frances, the Fruit
Fairy, was literally overgrown with blackberry and strawberry vines from
her neck to the hem of her skirt; and on her head was a thimble-berry
crown, the fruit itself, ripe and crimson, peeping out from under its
leaves. Like Betty she had a rustic table covered with moss, but her
wares were blueberries, huckleberries, wild raspberries, and even a few
belated strawberries, to be sold in their birch-bark baskets, or served
in saucers with sugar and cream.
The older girls had transformed themselves into trees. In a leafy booth
stood Eunice, Nancy, Grace and Winifred, their peaked caps, their belts
and the trimmings of their white gowns made of the bark of the golden
and the silver birch. Eunice and Nancy represented golden birches.
Eunice, with her fair hair fluffing out from under her shining yellow
headdress, was a tall and stately tree, and Nancy was the breeziest
little sapling that ever grew. Grace and Winifred were the silver
birches. The four girls had charge of a table on which was displayed
every imaginable device in birch bark, from glove-boxes to napkin rings;
and they also carried on a brisk traffic in Mrs. Brook’s home-made birch
beer.
Near by, where the evergreens made a natural bower, stood a table laden
with balsam cushions, a variety of fancy articles and samples of the
girls’ own wood-carving. The pine trees and the balsams presided over
it. Helen and Marion were the pine trees; tufts of pine needles formed
their garlands and, together with cones, trimmed their dresses. Ruth and
Dorothy were the balsams, wearing wreaths and ruffles of spicy balsam
foliage; and it was Ruth, who, having exhibited Limpy’s box and told the
story of its making, sold it to a sympathetic old gentleman for the
extravagant price of five dollars.
Then came a booth of beech and elder boughs. Here were Hope and Olive,
graceful young beeches, and Katrina and Louise, their gowns decked with
clusters of scarlet elderberries. At their table the classic beech leaf
and glowing elderberry appeared, painted by the camp artists, Marion and
Cecily, on dinner cards and blotters, paper folders and picture frames,
and embroidered on dainty pieces of needlework.
Gladys, Ethel and Pamela, with their leafy trimmings and coronets, were
pronounced the sweetest of sugar maples, and very popular was _their_
booth, for their wares were delicious maple-sugar cakes and candies.
But the queen of the whole forest was Carol, the Christmas tree, and to
her all the children made an instantaneous rush, on landing. The top of
a baby spruce reared itself above her sunny chestnut curls; sprays cut
from spruce saplings adorned her bodice and made her broad collar.
Branches rayed out from her skirt just as the boughs of a good old
Christmas tree should spread; and she shone resplendent with chains and
balls of colored glass and showers of tinsel. At her feet was a basket
full of toys and nicknacks wrapped up in red tissue paper, and being a
most ungenerous and mercenary tree, she allowed no gift to be drawn
until ten cents had been dropped into the Christmas stocking that she
held.
Flitting hither and thither, and much enamored of the Christmas tree,
was Nanno, who had changed her name to Black-eyed Susan. She was dressed
in bright yellow paper petals, and wore a gigantic paper
black-eyed-susan for a hat. The basket she carried was filled with wild
flowers—daisies, feathery meadow-rue and early asters; and her
irresistible Irish eyes and brogue, as she announced that her posies
were “foive cints a bunce,” caused her wares to vanish so early that she
ran in tears to the sea-nymphs, and had to be consoled with raspberry
ice.
With fairies and nymphs and lovely tree maidens to welcome them, it was
no wonder that the guests who attended the Forest Festival awoke from
their “Midsummer Day’s Dream” to find their arms full of parcels and
their purses light. Court was destined to awake absolutely penniless. He
bought souvenirs from every table; he would have had far more than his
share of toys had not the Christmas tree warded him off with a prickly
branch; and he kept sending back his sherbet glass to be refilled with
ices till Cecily declared: “You sha’n’t have another spoonful, or there
won’t be any left for other people! You’re worse than Jack!” His sister
Rose, beholding his increasing bundles, ironically inquired whether he
expected their great-aunt, Miss Van Courtlandt, to pay his bills for
him; but her sarcasm only incited him to purchase the Penfield lampmat.
“My, oh, my! That’s the thing to bring a tip from Aunt Sarah!” Court
exclaimed, lifting the woolly green horror from Betty’s fern table.
“I’ll send it to her for a present, and tell her I made it for her! Now
I can afford to spend my last ten cents on the Christmas tree! Hooray!
I’ll be a millionaire!”
Court went home with the lamp mat pinned on his coat for a rosette. He
paid Camp Huairarwee another call, however, as the twilight was falling
and the girls were watching for Douglas to return after his supper to
build their camp-fire.
“Douglas will be a little late this evening,” said Court. “He had
something to attend to, so I thought I’d offer my services to start your
fire. Have you counted up the money yet?”
“Yes,” Jean answered triumphantly, “and we’ve cleared seventy-three
dollars and forty-nine cents! Of course we raised it to seventy-five.”
“Good!” said Court. “Now, when I’m hard up I can borrow from Miss Stella
Olympia.”
To celebrate their success he made alarming inroads on Mrs. Brook’s
woodpile, and built the girls a magnificent bonfire. The flames were
just beginning to leap high, when Jean, glancing out over the lake,
exclaimed, “For pity’s sake what _is_ that _creature_?”
The others followed her gaze. An extraordinary and gigantic monster,
shadowy and mysterious in the dusk, had entered the bay and was swimming
toward their beach.
“What under the moon and canopy!” cried Carol.
“It’s the weirdest thing I ever saw in my life!” said Marion. “It’s
positively scary!”
“It’s alive!” cried Betty.
“It’s spouting fire!” exclaimed Cecily.
“It’s a fiery dragon! It is! It is!” cried Jean. “Look at its snaky
tail!”
“Oh, dear!” Frances, lamented. “I’m going to be gobbled up, and my mammy
and my daddy won’t know what’s become of me! I knew I was too good to
live!”
“It has a dorsal fin!” said Nancy. “Girls, it’s a sea-serpent!”
“Oh, joy!” said Carol. “The plesiosaurus has been sighted at last by
creditable witnesses! He’s a cultured and enlightened plessy, with a
fire in his jaws to roast us nicely before he swallows us.”
“He’s a vertebrate, whatever else he is!” said Eunice. “There’s a spinal
column for you!”
The colossal vertebrate was fully a hundred feet long, and to the eyes
of the girls his jointed tail looked at least twice that length. He had
a superb dorsal fin, and his monstrous head was upreared high above the
water. His eyes shone with red fire, his jaws were thrown wide, and he
was breathing out flames and smoke.
“He’s glaring at us with his fiery eyes!” said Jean.
“He’s a sea-serpent with a vengeance!” said Helen. “Look! He’s turning
this way! He’s making straight for us!”
“A real sea-serpent! How jolly!” cried Cecily. “We’ll get Court to tame
him, and have him for a pet! Court’s so set up by his conquest of
Cyclone, I know he’ll do it for us! Break him to twenty side-saddles,
Court, won’t you?”
“Cease, Cece, babbling Brook!” replied Court. “You little know what this
appearance means for you campers! Don’t you realize that this
sea-serpent proves an underground connection between Halcyon Lake and
the ocean? And now we shall have all sorts of dangerous things coming in
from the Atlantic,—sharks and sword-fish and octopuses! No more bathing
in the lake for you girls! No more boating! We hold your lives too
precious!”
“And you stand there smiling serenely, with your arms folded!” cried
Carol. “Don’t you know your duty is to dive down and stuff up the subway
entrance with the things you’ve been buying to-day? They’d plug it so
watertight the slimmest eel couldn’t get through! You might at least get
that lamp mat to hurl down the monster’s throat and poison him with the
Paris green!”
“I have too much regard for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals!” Court protested. “He won’t bite though. See, he’s wagging his
tail,—he’s pleased!”
With his mighty tail rocking to and fro in the rough water, the
fire-breathing sea-serpent came swimming through the bay with the
evident intention of reposing his snaky form somewhere upon the pebbly
strand. Roderick Dhu, faithful to his duty as guardian of the camp,
rushed up and down in a frenzy of barking.
“Mother must see it!” cried Cecily.
“Call Bunny and Miss Hamersley too!” said Carol.
“Get Marie and Amelie and Toinette!” added Jean.
Cecily ran up to the bungalow and came back with all the other members
of the camp.
The saurian reached the land off Camp-fire Rock, and lay in the rippling
water panting out flames in an exhausted manner, and writhing all down
the length of his spinal column, which, when viewed at close range, bore
a singular resemblance to canoes lashed together and covered with dark
green paper muslin.
“Poor dear, he’s tired out! Let’s help him up on shore and put a collar
and bells on him! He’ll make a lovely pet!” laughed Jean.
“Come and let’s dissect him,” said Carol. “I suspect we’ll find his
brains in his neck instead of in his head.”
Heedless of soaked shoes, the girls stepped into the water to examine
the anatomy of the sea-serpent. The head was mounted on a rowboat, and,
concealed behind the giant cranium, were Jack and Douglas.
“He swallowed us!” Douglas explained. “That’s why I couldn’t get up in
time to start your fire.”
“We stuck in his throat, though,” said Jack.
“I suppose you went down so quick you hadn’t time to catch fire in his
mouth!” said Cecily.
“He’s a noble animal!” exclaimed Nancy, surveying the monster’s head
with its round eyes and gaping jaws, in which the fire was dying down.
“I hope you appreciate the honor of being swallowed by him. What a
stunning fin he has! He’s a regular charmer!”
“He’s an awful blockhead, though,” said Douglas, tapping the wooden
skull.
“Look at his mouth!” said Jean. “It’s an old wash boiler!”
“He’d have got burned up if we hadn’t given him a tin mouth,” said
Douglas.
“Look at those tin pails stuck in for his eyes!” said Betty.
“What is he?” asked Eunice. “What’s his scientific name?”
“He’s a full-blooded megalodonto-bronto-sauriosticos,” replied Jack.
“Rose said you boys were up till midnight yesterday, and were all
late for breakfast this morning,” said Cecily. “Did the
megalo-what’s-his-name have anything to do with it?”
“The _tale_ of last night’s experiences is longer than the
sea-serpent’s,” said Jack, shaking his head reflectively.
“Do make meggy spout some more flames,” said Frances. And at her request
the megalo-donto-bronto-sauriosticos breathed forth the last of the red
fire saved from the Fourth of July.