"You’ve a good catch this time, haven’t you?" Mrs. Merrill’s voice behind her reassured Mary Jane. Her mother had followed them out and surely if her mother didn’t mind those queer things, they must be all right for she well knew her mother didn’t like spiders any better than she did! "But what _are_ they?" insisted Alice wonderingly. "Don’t you know," laughed Mrs. Bryan, "they’re lobsters. Sam caught ’em just to-day and a fine lot they are too. Do you like lobsters?" "Um-m," replied Alice, "do I? You just try me! But all the lobsters I ever ate were red, bright red." "Sure enough," laughed Mrs. Bryan as she bustled about a great iron pot in a corner, "and all you ever will eat will be, I hope, because they’ll be cooked. The cooking makes ’em red. These are alive." "But if they’re alive you can’t cook ’em!" exclaimed Mary Jane in great excitement. "Oh, yes we can," replied Mrs. Bryan comfortably, "just that easily. We have the water boiling hot and dump ’em in—just that quick and they never know what happens to ’em. Now you can go out this door," she added, "because we’ve got to hurry now with supper. But don’t you go far, for pretty soon you’ll hear a gong and that means ’come to supper!’ and you come first thing because I know you must be hungry." Mary Jane and Alice needed no urging—they were hungry, for it had been a long time since breakfast at Cousin Louise’s, and their hurried luncheon in Boston wasn’t much to remember. They ran out to the sand-pile, looked at the pretty shells, took a slide or two and a few swings in the big swing and made friends with the two children, a boy and a girl from Springfield, Massachusetts, who were playing there, and, in a very short while it seemed, the gong sounded and they went in to supper. It was a different sort of a supper from any Mary Jane had ever eaten away at a hotel—though as a matter of fact the Willow Tree Cottage wasn’t really a hotel at all; it was an old New England farmhouse enlarged a bit and opened to some twenty-five selected boarders through the summer season. And this meal truly was not a dinner such as Mary Jane was used to eating in the evening; it was a real supper, delicious and old fashioned as one could hope to find. There was coffee cake, fresh baked and luscious with great "wells" of sugar and butter running through in streaks of sweetness; baked beans in brown pots; cold ham, coldslaw with a sour cream sauce, and hot potatoes with cream gravy. And then, after each table full of guests were seated and the meal began, Mrs. Bryan herself (she would trust this task to no one else) appeared with a great platter of lobsters, red and shining and smelling oh, so good!