When the girls reached the tents again, the last article had been taken from the team and Manuel had driven away. The sound of Phil’s hammer could be heard from the carpenter-shop, and Pancho was already laying the tent floor in a small, open, sunny place, where the low boughs of a single sycamore hung so as to protect one of its corners, leaving the rest to the full warmth of the sunshine that was to make Elsie entirely well again. ‘I am tired to death,’ sighed Laura, throwing herself down in a bamboo lounging-chair. ‘Such a tramp as we had! and after all, the boys insisted on going where Dr. Winship wouldn’t allow us to follow, so that we had to stay behind and fish with the children; I wish I had stayed at home and read _The Colonel’s Daughter_.’ ‘Oh, Laura!’ remonstrated Margery, ‘think of that lovely pool with the forests of maiden-hair growing all about it!’ ‘And poison-oak,’ grumbled Laura. ‘I know I walked into some of it and shall look like a perfect fright for a week. I shall never make a country girl—it’s no use for me to try.’ ‘It’s no use for you to try walking four miles in high-heeled shoes, my dear,’ said Polly, bluntly. ‘They are not high,’ retorted Laura, ‘and if they are, I don’t care to look like a—a—cow-boy, even in the backwoods.’ ‘I’m an awful example,’ sighed Polly, seating herself on a stump in front of the tent, and elevating a very dusty little common-sense boot. ‘Sir Walter Raleigh would never have allowed me to walk on his velvet cloak with that boot, would he, girls? Oh, wasn’t that romantic, though? and don’t I wish that I had been Queen Elizabeth!’ ‘You’ve got the _hair_,’ said Laura.