“Please find me something to read—about—about girls having a party,” she choked.

When she was back at school, in her own room, clad once more in the loved blue silk kimono, the ordeal of dinner and curious questions over, Katherine, her room-mate, looked up from her algebra book and said suddenly,

“Oh, Peggy, we missed you so.”

“Did you?” cried Peggy wistfully. “Well, I’ve decided something. I don’t care a bit about being a belle. I’d rather get to places on time, and feel like myself,—and be just Peggy Parsons, after all.”

 CHAPTER III—A BACON BAT

An eventful day for Peggy came after two weeks of school. In it began a curious series of happenings that added flavor to her whole school life, and gave her, finally, the power to be, as her room-mate laughingly said, “sort of magic.”

And all this came about through so prosaic a thing as bacon. The domestic science class, well under way with an excellent teacher, decided to have a “bacon bat,” after the custom of the Smith College girls, all by themselves on some bit of rock that jutted into the river.

Peggy had helped Katherine do the shopping for the treat,—Katherine had been at Andrews for two years now, and knew just how it was done. Then the seven girls of the class started off, each with a paper bag in her hand, for the method of conveying the supplies to the picnic grounds was always very informal for a bacon bat. There were no little woven picnic baskets to hang picturesquely over their arms, there were no daintily packed little shoe-boxes of sandwiches. There was just the jar of bacon strips in a paper bag, the bottle of olives in another paper bag, and the two dozen rolls, a generous supply, in the biggest paper bag of all. These were the simple requisites for a bacon bat, and even the olives were not necessary, Katherine termed them useless frills. There was a tiny box of matches, too, that Peggy slipped into the pocket of her red jacket. It has happened that a merry group of girls has gone on a bacon bat with everything but the matches, and then unless they were Camp Fire girls and knew how to coax fire out of two dry sticks they met a terrible disappointment, when, their appetites all worked up for the occasion, they found they couldn’t cook the party after all.

If you were on good terms with the grocer, he kept a box of matches—the old fashioned kind—under the counter and offered you a dozen or so, loose, when you bought your bacon. 

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