"There are three more laws," he went on, after a minute, "and they speak for themselves: 'A Scout is brave,' 'A Scout is clean,' 'A Scout is reverent.' I need not tell you to be brave in the presence of danger. Do you understand that sometimes it takes greater courage to stand up for the right? Keep yourselves clean; not only your bodies but your thought and speech. And be reverent, boys, toward God, who made old Greylock and these beautiful hills for you to enjoy." When he had finished Skinny started to throw some wood on the fire, but Mr. Norton stopped him. "Never go away," he said, "leaving a fire where it possibly can do any damage. We'll be going home in a few minutes, and before we go this fire must be put out. If the wind should come up in the night the flames might spread into Plunkett's woods." We saw in a minute that he was right, and, taking sticks, beat out what little fire there was; then started down the hill. "I'll tell you what I have been thinking," said Mr. Norton, when we were going through Blackinton's orchard. "We have had so much fun to-night that I should like to go camping with you boys for a week, some time this summer. These mountains and woods are just the places for scouting and we could have a campfire every night. What do you say?" "We say yes," said Skinny, "if our folks will let us, and I know they will." "Can we play Indian, Mr. Norton?" asked Benny. "We certainly can. I think everybody likes to get out into the woods and be an Indian once a year. You boys have something to do first, however. I want every one of you to be able to show a First Class Scout badge." "We can do most of the stunts now," I told him, "only we haven't been seven miles and back." The book says that before becoming a First Class Scout a boy must go on foot to a point seven miles away and return again, and afterward to write a short account of the trip. It says, too, that it would be better to go one day and come back the next, and that means to camp out all night. That last was a hard thing to do because our mothers did not want us to go off that way alone. Mothers always seem to think a boy is going to get hurt or something. Mr. Norton finally talked them into it, all except Benny's mother. She wouldn't stand for it. Benny cried, he felt so badly about it. "Do it in one day, then," Mr. Norton told him. "Remember that the law says for you to obey your parents without question. That is more important than to do the stunt." CHAPTER VI A FOURTEEN-MILE HIKE SCHOOL let out Thursday, June 22, and it had seemed to us as if the day never would come. Not that we don't like school because we do--sometimes; but when the sap drips from the maples and bees buzz around the pussywillows on the river bank and all the trees take on a different look, as if there was going to be something doing right away, then the time has come for us to get out our marbles and tops and to fix up the cave for the summer.