“I’m not too old yet, Phoebe,” laughed Miss Haynes, “but I want to get out as easily as possible during the spring migration of birds,--so I want a pleasant April and May.”
“We’ll do our best to get it for you, Miss Haynes,” declared Nan, rising with Jean, to go. You didn’t want a teacher to get tired of you, of course, and Miss Haynes was busy. Funny, she didn’t like tests, either, because you had to grade papers. Still, how would she find out who knew anything?
The girls hurried home to call up the rest of the S. P.’s and notify them of the hike. Leigh said that her father had a field glass. She would bring that. Mrs. French hunted up an old opera glass for Molly. Kinds of sandwiches were distributed according to the variety each was in the habit of making most successfully. Chocolate bars were bought, to be stowed in pockets.
Without something hot it would be a funny sort of a beach party, they thought. Accordingly local shops sold a few tin cups or those equally light. The girls would have cocoa.
In the morning, Jean, who had no glass to carry, put her sandwiches in an aluminum kettle, carefully wrapped “not to rattle and scare the birds away.” Water could be found at springs familiar to all of them. Cream went farther than milk and was not so heavy. One bottle was tucked in the pocket of Phoebe’s oldest coat and Nan put another in hers. Pockets bulged and Bess swung from her arm a box of marshmallows, these for toasting.
Miss Haynes smiled broadly when the seven girls made their appearance at the door of her boarding house, just as she was starting out. “Good for you,” she cried, “all with sensible wraps on. I fancy, from the looks of your pockets, that we shall not go hungry.”
Familiar as the girls thought they were with the country about their town, Miss Haynes, a comparative stranger, could show many new things; for some conveyance had usually taken them to the big lake, and to the smaller ones sometimes, for their beach parties, and many very interesting bypaths were unknown to the girls.
How wet it was. Water came up around their overshoes as they walked over the soft turf by the muddy road. Snow lay in the fence corners. But the sky was blue and the birds were already singing, some meadow larks in a field and a flock of red-winged blackbirds in a swampy place not far out of town. Miss Haynes called attention to a song sparrow in a little leafless tree, where twigs and bird were etched against the sky. For the first time the Stealthy Prowlers deserved their new name, as they crept near enough to get a good look at the brown splashes on the sparrow’s breast, with the “breast-pin” where they coalesce. And while they watched, the little finch bill opened and the bubbling, merry song rang out.