The two little girls talked of the long tramp that the boys would have before they would find the hermit's hut. "And perhaps they won't find it at all, after all their hunting," said Nancy. "Well, I hope they will," said Dorothy, "because it's so horrid to hunt and hunt, for nothing." "Oh, look!" she cried a moment later. "See the lovely mosses! Let's take some back to mamma and Aunt Charlotte." They were, indeed, beautiful. There was green moss that looked like velvet, and gray moss formed like tiny cups with scarlet edges, and other moss tipped with red. On an old stump they found shell-like fungus, some a creamy white, others white, with soft brown markings. Oh, a fine collection of rarely beautiful mosses and lichens they gathered, and heaped on the bottom of the phaeton. Romeo turned his head to watch them as if he wondered when they would have gathered enough. "Oh, we do keep you standing, dear, don't we?" Dorothy said, patting his neck as she spoke. "Oh, you needn't look for sugar," she said, laughing, "for I haven't any with me, but we'll get you some fresh clover." With Nancy's help she soon had a fine bunch of pink clover for Romeo, and he seemed quite as pleased as if it had been the cubes that he so often enjoyed. * * * * * When the party of boys had left the road to cross the fields that lay between them, and the forest at the foot of the mountain, they had believed that they knew exactly how to go to reach the hermit's hut. The old hermit had been dead for years, but every season the summer guests at the hotels and farmhouses searched all around the deserted hut, expecting to find some relic to take home and label as a bit of the hermit's property. The boys supposed that they had the woods to themselves, and that they would be uninterrupted in their search of the place. They did not know that the mountain climbers had taken the same direction, intending, before they enjoyed their lunch beneath the trees, to stop at the old, deserted house. Mrs. Paxton and little Floretta had worked more persistently than any others of the party, and Mrs. Paxton had found a small, brass button. The others had laughed at the prize, asking her if she intended to keep it as a souvenir. "Certainly," said Mrs. Paxton. "I'm sure this brass button must have belonged on some old coat that the hermit wore!" "Perhaps in his youth, before he came up here to live, he may have been a janitor," said a young man, with a saucy laugh. "Or a brakeman," suggested another. Mrs. Paxton pretended not to hear their teasing, and though the prize that she had found had been only a valueless thing, she kept it. Floretta was very eager to stay, and continue to peep into cracks in the floor and walls, and to poke with a stick under the doorsill, and in the soft earth around the hut.