But Peggy had wanted to buy a little box, insisting that if she had to start the fire a dozen might not be enough.

“Where are we going to have it?” Peggy thought to ask as they strolled, laughing, along the road away from the school.

“On the River Bank near Gloomy House,” cried three girls at once, “that’s the ideal spot.”

“Near—what?” asked Peggy in concern. It didn’t sound very picnicky to her.

“Right there, ahead,” said Katherine, pointing, “right through those grounds, and down to the water—because, of course, we can hardly have our fire except on some sort of little stone island—with water enough to put it out if it got rambunctious.”

The girls were turning now over the long, dank grass, and making their way in the direction of a great empty-looking ramshackle old house with sagging porches and dull windows.

“Nobody lives there, do they?” Peggy asked.

“Oh,—sh—yes!”

The girls tiptoed over the grass, skirting the lawn in order to keep as far away from Gloomy House as possible. Peggy was not yet familiar with the traditions of the town in which Andrews was situated. It seemed strange to her that after the girls had chosen this place with such unanimous enthusiasm they should assume such an air of discomfort and mystery now that they had come. She studied the old house, dignified even in its decay, with its trailing, rasping vines blowing against the pillars of the porch, and its sunken, uneven steps, and then quite unaccountably she shivered and hurried past it as fast as the other girls.

“I don’t want to come here for a picnic,” she panted, “if it’s all so queer. Why didn’t we choose some nice sunny place with a little stream to drink out of, and one big tree for shade? It’s so dark and overgrown, as we get through here, that it seems more like an exploring expedition than a regular picnic to me.”

“Oh,” cried Florence Thomas, the best cook in the domestic science class, “we can fry bacon down on those rocks in the river, and there is a grape-vine swing on the bank that goes sailing way out over the water with you. Why, there just isn’t any other place so nice for a picnic—here you always feel as if you might have adventures.”

“Adventures, at a picnic, usually mean cows or snakes,” sighed Peggy, “I hope we don’t have any.”

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