E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.fadedpage.com) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 31200-h.htm or 31200-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/31200/pg31200-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31200/31200-h.zip) The Wide Awake Girls Series THE WIDE AWAKE GIRLS IN WINSTED by KATHARINE RUTH ELLIS Author of "The Wide Awake Girls" Illustrated from drawings by Sears Gallagher [Illustration: "'Here is a little souvenir for you, Judge Arthur.'" Frontispiece. See page 266.] Boston Little, Brown, and Company Copyright, 1909, By Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved Printers S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A. To GLADYS GODDARD who has been the friend of many boys and girls this book is affectionately inscribed. PREFACE The author wishes to acknowledge gratefully the kindness of Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin and Company in allowing her to use the poem _Vantage_, by Josephine Preston Peabody in this book. She also thanks Miss Margaret Sherwood for consenting to a similar use of her poem, _Indian Summer_. Books for girls are frankly suggestive, their value lying in their kindling power. Among the girls of all sorts who may read this story, there will be, here and there, one who loves right words. It is for the sake of such an occasional reader that the poems mentioned have been included. The schools sometimes lead their pupils to believe that English literature, like Latin, belongs to the past. But there are, here and now, "musicians of the word" who, partly because they are living, can touch our hearts as none of the dead-and-gone ones can. If through these pages some girl finds her way to the little green volume of _Singing Leaves_, or the sweet stories of _Daphne_ and _King Sylvaine and Queen Aimée_, Catherine Smith and her friends will have done the world of girls a service worth the doing. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE