The children promised at least a dozen things.  They would keep away from the barn, the live stock, the railroad, the ponds, and the cisterns.  They would not ride their wheels, climb trees, nor go off the Maclntyre premises, and they would keep a sharp lookout for snakes and poison ivy, in case they went into the woods for wild flowers.

[Illustration:  VIRGINIA AND THE CALF.]

“Seems to me there’s mighty little left that a fellow can do,” said Keith, when the long list was completed.

“Oh, the time will soon pass,” said his grandmother, who was preparing to take the eleven o’clock train.  “It will soon be lunch-time.  Then this is the day for you each to write your weekly letters to your mother, and it is so pretty in the woods now that I am sure you will enjoy looking for violets.”

Time did pass quickly, as their grandmother had said it would, until the middle of the afternoon.  Then Virginia began to wish for something more amusing than the quiet guessing games they had been playing in the library.  The boys each picked up a book, and she strolled off up-stairs, in search of a livelier occupation.

In a few minutes she came down, looking like a second Pocahontas in her Indian suit, with her bow and arrows slung over her shoulder.

“I am going down to the woods to practise shooting,” she announced, as she stopped to look in at the door.

“Oh, wait just a minute!” begged Malcolm, throwing down his book.  “Let’s all play Indian this afternoon.  We’ll rig up, too, and build a wigwam down by the spring rock, and make a fire,—­grandmother didn’t say we couldn’t make a fire; that’s about the only thing she forgot to tell us not to do.”

“You can come on when you get ready,” answered Virginia.  “I’m going now, because it is getting late, but you’ll find me near the spring when you come.  Just yell.”

The boys could not hope to rival Virginia’s Indian costume, but no wilder-looking little savages ever uttered a war-whoop than the two which presently dashed into the still April woods.

Malcolm had ripped some variegated fringe from a table-cover to pin down the sides of his leather leggins.  He had borrowed a Roman blanket from Aunt Allison’s couch to pin around his shoulders, and emptied several tubes of her most expensive paints to streak his face with hideous stripes and daubs.  A row of feathers from the dust-brush was fastened around his forehead by a broad band, and a hatchet from the woodshed provided him with a tomahawk.

Keith had no time to arrange feathers.  He had taken off his flannels in order to put on an old striped bathing-suit, which he had found in the attic and stored away, intending to use it for swimming in the pond when the weather should grow warm enough.  It had no sleeves, and the short trousers had shrunk until they did not half-way reach his knees.  Its red and white stripes had faded and the colour run