the girls crowded inside the cottage and looked about them curiously.

The room they had entered was large and scrupulously neat. At first
glance it seemed a queer combination of hunting lodge and museum of
natural history. The rough clapboards and beams of the ceiling and
walls had never been plastered, and this very crudity seemed somehow
to give the room an air of warmth and homelikeness that was very
inviting.

Hung on the walls were several fairly large skins of animals, a gun or
two, and over the huge open fireplace, which very nearly covered one
end of the room, hung the magnificent head of a buck.

On the wall opposite the fireplace was a set of rudely-erected
shelves, one beneath the other, and these shelves were covered with
specimens of butterflies, beetles and other bugs of every size and
description. That the specimens had been mounted by an expert even an
inexperienced eye could see.

The girls, who had been regarding the oddities of the room with
growing interest, were brought back to a realization of the discomfort
of wet clothes by the owner of the place himself.

The latter had brought firewood from somewhere, and, with the aid of
half a dozen matches, had succeeded in getting a fairly good blaze.

Then with a smile of satisfaction he turned to the girls, rubbing his
hands together genially.

"Come nearer to the fire-- come closer-- do," he urged in his quick