Presently, under some spreading beeches, the friends and neighbors who have come to these woods, as is their wont in sultry weather, for a few hours of recreation, gather together for luncheon—without ceremony of table or table-cloth, for this is “no stiff affair,” as some one complacently remarks, but quite “all in the familee,” as Harry says, bringing forth from its hiding-place an unexpected treat. And now everybody understands why so little has been seen of him to-day. Doesn’t he know these miles of woodland by heart? Is there any tree so tall he hasn’t climbed it, or any stream so small he hasn’t traced it to its source? He can show you all the crows’ nests and all the rabbit burrows, and even hint to you mysteriously that a fox dwells hereabout. He knows the banks where the strawberries reddened in June, and the hill-sides where the chestnuts will burst their burs in October, and it is only he who could surprise the company with this heaping basket of blackberries, so fresh and ripe and luscious, still wet with last night’s dew. “Hal, you’re a brick!” exclaims a youth of his own age, piling his plate with the proffered fruit. “Oo is weal dood, Hawy, I lite oo!” lisps the infantile voice of Maggie McAllister, two wee, dimpled fists making a successful dive into the basket. “You ah the light of me eyes and the joy of me haaht!” murmurs a recent graduate from a boarding-school, languidly inserting a dessert-spoon the while she regards this young man—not yet far advanced in his teens, to be sure—as benignly as if he were about the size of Maggie, there. “Let ’em help themselves,” he mutters in disgust, setting down the basket directly, and joining Marie where she is seated at the foot of a tree. “I can stand half a day in a swamp and poke amongst blackberry briers till my hands resemble the map of Germany done in red chalk, but I can’t go that sort of thing. Let’s wish.” Master Harry has not been many seconds in divesting of its edible surroundings that part of the fowl which is known to all as the “wish-bone,” and which the slender fingers of the “popinjay” always manage to break in her favor. “Say, now, what did you wish? (You have to tell, you know.) That there would be another war or revolution right off, so you could have a chance to show your courage?” “Now you needn’t make any more fun of my courage. But I don’t care if you do think I’m a coward. I belong to somebody that was brave as a lion. He was a duke, or marquis, or something. For, you see, we didn’t live in this country in the time of the Revolution.” “Oh!” “No, we lived in France, and belonged to the nobility. I’ve been asking grandpa all about it, and he told me such a _splen_did story.