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.