"You don't mean I have actually landed at Week-End Camp? Why, that is
what I have been looking for, but I had no idea of striking it the first
thing, right out of the blue, as it were. I heard about the camp at the
University, and want to come board there for a while."
"Well, I am the one to apply to," said Nan primly.
"Apply to a wood nymph for board! Absurd!"
"Not at all! Of course, I can't take you to board without knowing your
name and--er--number."
"Well, if you must, you must--Tom Smith is my name--as for my
number--there is only one of me."
"I mean by your number, where you live."
"Oh, I live in the air mostly. Sometimes I come down to have some
washing done and to vote--at least, I came down once to vote--that was
last June, but as no elections were going on just then and as my having
arrived at the age of twenty-one did not seem to make them hurry, I
went up in the air again. When I do vote, though, it will be out in
Louisville, Kentucky. That's where I have my washing done. You don't
say what you think of such a name as Tom Smith."
"It is not very--romantic, but it must have been a nice name to go to
school with."
"Great! There were so many of us that the lickings didn't go round."
The girl was leading the way down the mountain path and they came to the
spring where she had performed her ablutions earlier.
"This is the fountain of Pirene."
"Ah! I fancied we would come to it soon," and he stooped and drank his
fill, shaking the drops from his crisp curls as he got up.
"I love to drink that way," cried Nan. "I had a big deep drink as I went
up the mountain."
"Of course you drink that way! How else could a wood nymph drink? You
might make a cup of your little brown hand, but even that is almost too
modern. Ah, there is the camp! How jolly it looks! Are there any people
there? It looks so quiet."
"Any people there? Quiet! It is running over with people. They are all
asleep now, that is the reason it is so quiet. There will be noise
enough later."
As she spoke there were shouts from the shower bath where some of the
youths from the camp had assembled for a community shower, and as the
cold mountain water struck them they certainly made the welkin ring.
"There is father! Come, and I'll introduce you."
Mr. Carter was coming from the kitchen bearing a cup of coffee for his
wife, who stuck to the New Orleans habit of black coffee the first thing
in the morning, and Mr. Carter loved to be the one to take it to her
bedside.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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