I hardly heard them. To make this come true at one stroke! Even to be able to adopt a child! How easily they could do things, these grown-up ones; and how magnificently they acted as if it were nothing at all ... like the giants planting city-seed and watching cities grow to the size and shape of giants’ flower beds.... They went on talking. Some of the things that they said we might have said ourselves. In some ways they were not so very different from us. Yet think what they could accomplish. Watching them and listening, there in the April twilight, I began to understand. It was not only that they could have their own way. But for the sake of things that we had never yet so much as guessed or dreamed, it was desirable to be grown up. IV THE PICNIC It was Delia Dart who had suggested our Arbour Day picnic. “Let’s have some fun Arbour Day,” she said. We had never thought of Arbour Day in that light. Exercises, though they presented the open advantage of escape from the school grind, were no special fun. Fun was something much more intimate and intangible, definite and mysterious, casual and thrilling--and other anomalies. “Doing what?” we demanded. “Oh,” said Delia, restlessly, “go off somewheres. And eat things. And do something to tell about and make their eyes stick out.” We were not old enough really to have observed this formula for adventure. Hitherto we had always gone merely because we went. Yet all three motives appealed to us. And events fostered our faint intention. At the opening of school that morning, Miss Messmore made an announcement.... I remember her grave way of smiling and silent waiting, so that we hung on what she was going to say. “To-morrow,” she said, “is Arbour Day. All who wish will assemble here at the usual hour in the afternoon. We are to plant trees and shrubs and vines about the schoolhouse. There will be something for each one to plant. But this is not required. Any who do not wish to be present may remain away, and these will not be marked absent. Only those may plant trees who wish to plant trees. I hope that all children will take advantage of their opportunity. Classes will now pass to their places.” Delia telegraphed triumphantly in several directions. We could hardly wait to confer. At recess we met immediately in the closet under the stairs, a closet intended primarily for chalk, erasers, brooms, and maps, but by virtue of its window and its privacy put to sub-uses of secret committee meetings. “I told you,” said Delia. And such was Delia’s magnetism that we felt that she had told us. “Let’s take our lunch and start as soon as we get out.” “Couldn’t we go after the exercises?” Calista Waters submitted waveringly. “_After!_” said Delia, scornfully. “It’ll be three o’clock. _That’s_ no fun. We want to start by twelve, prompt, and stay till six.”