Fairyland, indeed, seemed beaten hollow as "across the lake in golden glory" the waning sunbeams of early June bathed the little floating pier, wreathed in laurel and daisy chains, then climbed with flagging feet, like a tired angel, the sod-steps cut into the side of the steep cliff, and, gaining the top, joined their rose-colored brothers skipping among girlish forms in every fair hue imaginable, claiming partners in a dance as of Northern Lights before ever their human brothers, the scouts in gilded khaki, got a chance at a reel. "Oh! I feel it in my toes that this is going to be a won-der-ful party," said Toandoah's little pal, kicking lightly, impatiently with those satin toes of her party slippers at the tufted grass, as she sat enthroned upon the sod of the cliff's brow, with two knights beside her, Stud of the stout heart, and a bright-eyed luckless tenderfoot, whose parents, in a fit of dementia surely, had named him Louis Philip Green, which, as he used only the initial letter of his second name, had of course entailed a nickname. "You promised you'd dance the Lancers with me, although I'm only a tenderfoot," said Peagreen, nibbling a blade of grass as he lay prone upon the sod and shooting a glance, bright and eager as a robin's, in the direction of the black-haired girl with those skybeams in her eyes under inky lashes. "Humph! The cheek of some kids who ought to be tucked up in their Beehive when--when that dance comes off!" grumbled the fifteen-year-old Stud, with the arrogance of a Patrol Leader, directing his glance at a brown, conical bungalow flanking a large one, where the younger boys turned in at what seemed to them unseemly hours, while scout veterans sat up overhauling the day's doings for an occasion of a laugh against somebody, practical joke, of course, preferred, to be published in the Henkyl Hunter's typewritten Bulletin and hung up in the porch next morning. "Well! I'm safe for the Grand March, anyhow--and the Virginia reel, too, eh!" Stud dug congratulatory fists into his brown sides, wriggling aggressively upon the cliff-brow, like Peagreen figuratively hugging the ground with an impatient nose. Privately he was inclined to the opinion that the blue-eyed girl's friend who had that little nearsighted stand in one of her dark eyes, and two dimples to Pemrose's one, was the daintier "peach" of the two--and that his own sister, Jess, was as pretty as either; but think of the distinction of leading off with a girl whose father would lead off amid the dance of planets, in sending a messenger to the moon, Mars, too, maybe! "Whoopee!" He kicked the sod as if spurning it as common or garden earth--although there were moments when, like others--elders--in a skeptical world, he told himself that the Thunder Bird would prove, after all, a Flying Dutchman,--just an extravagant dream.