Well! to recall Stud's figure of speech, nobody was "whistling jigs" to his milestone heart now--or trying to. The fire was the fiddler; and wax was not softer or more responsive than the pliant breasts on which its music fell. "I watched a log in the fireplace burning." They whispered it one to another and under the spell of its transfiguring lay, bent forward, they witnessed the last act in a pine-tree pantomime. A dazzling transformation scene it was: in the glow they could see, summed up, each transition of light and heat that went before: dawn's tender flame, the fierce blaze of high noon, ruby rays of evening streaming now across the Bowl--hill-girt lake without--gathered, all gathered, in a golden age behind them to feed the sap of a noble tree, here poured forth, amid a radiant ballet of flame and spark, to furnish life, light--inspiration--to a Council Fire. "I watched a log in the fireplace burning, Oh! if I, too, could only be Sure to give back the love and laughter, That Life so freely gave to me!" Tanpa, the Guardian, softly breathed it. And in the eye of more than one girl the wish was transmuted into a tear,--into something more tender, more transported, than a laugh, as the log, in a final spurt, gave all, and fell, like a tired dancer, upon the broad hearth, its rosy chiffons crumpled and fading into the pale gray of wood-ashes. "There it goes!" The eyes of Pemrose were a patchwork now, flame embroidered upon their shining blue; oh! if she were to give forth what Life gave to her, which of her Camp Fire Sisters would have such riches to reflect? It had been hers--hers--to share the dream of a great inventor, to look forward with him to the pioneering moment--the beginning of that which would surely, in time, draw the Universe visibly together--the moment when the Thunder Bird should fly. She never qualified that dream by an _if_, wherever the funds to equip it might come from--or even if it had to wait a dozen years, Toandoah's triumph, like that fortune "hung up--" for the great Bird to make its new migration to the moon, in proof that space was no barrier--when the Thunder Bird, giving all, as the log had done, would drop its skeleton upon the desert of that silent satellite. But there were steps to be taken in the meantime--exciting steps in the ladder of success. Those patchwork eyes, looking into the flame now, counted them, one by one, and hung in breathless anticipation upon the first: upon the moment, so soon to come off, when old Greylock would really send back a shout of gladness, for on his darkling summit the hand of a Camp Fire Girl of America would press the button and loose the lesser Thunder Bird to fly up the modest distance of a couple of hundred miles, or so, with its diary in its head, and send back the novel record of its flight.