Below the bungalow the three-mile lake, a mile and a half across--the transfigured Bowl--was still a softly glowing pearl, treasured in cotton-wool mists which entirely hid its real framing of lofty hills. "When the mountains cease playing blindman's buff with each other, then--then it will be time for our morning swim, won't it? The first real swim of the season, too," murmured Tomoke, the signaling maiden, nestling coaxingly near to the presiding Guardian. "Yes, if you think the water will be warm enough." "Oh! it was quite warm yesterday when we paddled out around the float--the floating pier." Jessie, who was tempting the feathered Santa Claus, pampered captive under her arm, with every tidbit she could think of, from cereal to lake-cod caught by the girls themselves, looked down at that buoyant pier--a golden raft, at the moment--tossing a dozen yards from the base of a fifteen-foot cliff where the shore jumped sharply down to the water. Yesterday it had been wreathed with boughs for the coming festival: the swimming structure, naevely composed of two great barrels, boarded over, with a broad plank, as a bridge, running out ashore. To it a couple of shining canoes and two broad camp boats were moored; it also served as a springboard for diving. Built by girl-carpenters themselves--with a little masculine help--presently to be garlanded with daisy-chains and buttercups, for the June carnival, and to hide its crudity, it stood, so the Guardian thought, exquisitely for the practical and the poetic in Camp Fire life, which ever in "glorifying Work" seeks Beauty! The sun was seeking that too, just now, gloating over his own noble reflection in the green-lipped Bowl,--benevolently promising, indeed, a day hot for the season, as well as radiant. "Yes! the temperature has taken a leap ahead," said Tanpa musingly. "I think you can go in--for a short swim, any way." "Notify me--notify me if you see me drowning--for I can't hear the voice of doom through my bathing cap!" laughed Una Grosvenor, two hours later, in consequence of this permission, wading coyly out beyond the float, to where the lake-water rose over the crossed logs of the Camp Fire emblem on the breast of her blue bathing suit. "Oh! she's in no danger of drowning; she swims better than I--I do-o now," shivered Pemrose, rather wishing that June were July and the Bowl had undergone the gradual glow of a heating process. "Aren't you coming, Thrush?" she cried. "Aren't you coming in, Jessie?" "I can't leave the owl! I believe the boys meant him as an anniversary present--though they went about presenting him in a queer way," was the fostering answer. The other girls, however, were in the water, as those grigs of boys had been before them; the Bowl seemed to froth with their laughter, spray creaming around the bare, sunflushed arms flung above it, as if the lake itself, in festive mood, were a sentient sharer in the joy of these daring June bathers.