courteous reception.

* * * * *




CHAPTER II.

THE BOY SCOUTS' INVASION.


That was a grand surprise that the Boy Scouts of Spring Lake academy
"put over" on the Camp Fire Girls of Hiawatha Institute. They had been
planning it for several weeks, or since they first received
information of the Grand Council Fire as a closing event of the first
semester of the girls' school. The two institutions were located in
municipalities only fifteen miles apart, connected by both steam
railroad and electric interurban lines.

Spring Lake academy, located on a lake of the same name at the
southern outskirt of Kingston, was originally a boys' military school,
and it still retained that primal distinction. But the success of
Hiawatha Institute as a Camp Fire Girls' school set the imaginative
minds of some of the leaders of the boys at Spring Lake to work along
similar lines, with the result that the faculty's cooperation was
petitioned for the organization of the student body into a troop of
Boy Scout patrols. The scheme was successful, and as it served to
inject new life into the academy, the business end of the institution
had no ground for complaint.