Cold, darkness and disorder everybody had expected to find.  But it was a blow to discover that the great stone fireplace, the one real beauty of the room, and the delight of every chilly evening, had been brought down by some winter gale.  A bleak gap marked its once hospitable vicinity, cool air rushed in where the breath of dancing flames had so often rushed out, and, some in a great heap on the hearth, and some flung in muddy confusion to the four corners of the room, the sooty stones lay scattered.

It was a bad moment for everyone.  Betsey began to cry, her weary little head on her mother’s shoulder.

“This won’t do!” Mrs. Carroll said perplexedly.  “B-r-r-r-r!  How cold it is!”

“This is rotten,” Jimmy said bitterly.  “And all the fellows are going to the Orpheum to-night too!” he added enviously.

“It’s warm here compared to the bedroom,” Susan, who had been investigating, said simply.  “The blankets feel wet, they’re so cold!”

“And too wet for a camp-fire—­” mused the mother.

“And the stage gone!” Billy added.

A cold draught blew open the door and set the candle guttering.

“Oh, I’m so cold!” Susan said, hunching herself like a sick chicken.

The rest of the evening became family history.  How they took their camping stove and its long tin pipe from the basement, and set it up in the woodshed that, with the little bedroom, completed the cabin, how wood from the cellar presently crackled within, how suitcases were opened by maddening candle-light, and wet boots changed for warm slippers, and wet gowns for thick wrappers.  How the kettle sang and the bacon hissed, and the coffee-pot boiled over, and everybody took a turn at cutting bread.  Deep in the heart of the rain-swept, storm-shaken woods, they crowded into the tiny annex, warm and dry, so lulled by the warm meal and the warm clothes that it was with great difficulty that Mrs. Carroll roused them all for bed at ten o’clock.

“I’m going to sleep with you, Sue,” announced Betsey, shivering, and casting an envious glance at her younger brother who, with Billy, was to camp for that night in the kitchen, “and if it’s like this to-morrow, I vote that we all go home!”

But they awakened in all the fragrant beauty and stillness of a great forest, on a heavenly August morning.  Sunshine flooded the cabin, when Susan opened her eyes, and the vista of redwood boughs beyond the window was shot with long lines of gold.  Everywhere were sweetness and silence; blots of bright gold on feathery layers of soft green.  High-arched aisles stretched all about the cabin like the spokes of a great wheel; warm currents, heavy with piney sweetness, drifted across the crystal and sparkling brightness of the air.  The rain was gone; the swelled creek rushed noisily down a widened course; it was cool now, but the day would be hot.  Susan, dressing with her eyes on the world beyond the window, was hastened by a sudden delicious odor of boiling coffee, and the delightful sound of a crackling wood fire.