creature making a stump-speech, while an admiring audience of
grasshoppers and tarantulas seat themselves in a circle on the
toadstools.'

'Charming prospect!' said Madge. 'I don't think I care to visit the
Lone Stump or pass my mornings there.'

'Nonsense, dear child; it is just like every other part of the
canyon, only a little more lonely. It is not half a mile from camp,
and hardly a dozen steps from the place where the boys go so often to
shoot quail.'

'Very well,' said the girls. 'We must go there to-morrow morning;
and perhaps we'd better not tell the boys,--they are so peculiar.
Jack will certainly interfere with us in some way, if he hears about
it.'

'Now let us take our books and run down by the pool for an hour or
two,' said Bell. 'Papa and the boys are all off shooting, and mamma
is lying down. We can have a cool, quiet time; the sunshine is so
hot here by the tents.'

Accordingly, they departed, as they often did, for one of the
prolonged chats in which school-girls are wont to indulge, and which
so often, too, are but idle, senseless chatter.

These young people, however, had been fortunate in having the wisest
and most loving guardianship, so that all their happy young lives had
been spent to good purpose. They had not shirked study, and so their
minds were stocked with useful information; they had read carefully