“It’s a long way to shore now,
It’s a long way to go!”

So sang a laughing voice to the blossoming wave that was barely two inches below the singer’s lips!

So full of frolic was that voice chanting amid the foam, as the white-flowering waves broke about a girl-swimmer, that it would be hard for an onlooker to believe that those tidal waves, themselves, were not sentient sharers of her joy.
“It’s a long way to shore now,
It’s a long way to go,
It’s a long way to shore now,
To the dearest girls I know!
Good-by, Morning-Glory!
Farewell, Betty, fair!
It’s a long—long—way to yonder shore now,
But my heart’s right there!”

improvised Sally again, breasting a foam-hill through the watery transparency of which her bare arms laughed—no other word could so well express their exuberant motions—while her shoulders in the blue bathing-suit, with a flame-colored emblem on the breast, held a mimic boxing-match with the waves and her head in its red silk turban nodded saucily to her “heart”—or its reflection—upon “yonder shore,” some sixty yards away.

“She swims like a fish, that Sesooā one—that’s her Camp Fire name,” commented Captain Andy as he wended his way along a white beach, bordered on one side by the incoming surge of a tidal river, on the other by a snowy rampart of sand-hills plumed with vegetation.

His remark was directed to a shrinking little figure by his side in a “lengthened” muslin dress, brown-dotted, now, and a wide leghorn hat, too childish for her years, with broad streamers of laundered white ribbon hanging down her back.

“They’re strong on names, those Camp Fire Girls,” remarked the florid seaman, encouragingly making conversation, as the small footsteps beside him flagged. “I’m blessed if they didn’t go to work an’ hunt up one—an Indian name with a meaning—for me. It had only twenty-two letters to it.”

“What did it mean?” questioned Kitty, shyly, as her granduncle paused to watch the frolicking figure amid the foam-hills with the flaming symbol of crossed logs upon her breast—signifying that among the Camp Fire Girls she held the rank of Wood Gatherer—and other girlish figures bathing, diving or swimming near her.

“Mean! It was taken from the Ojibway language and it meant something like ‘Wind-in-the-trees-Man!’ They said my voice, or my roar, was like that. But I up an’ said that the name was too long—a comber—knocked me over like a big wave—d’ye understand? And that I objected to being called a ‘Big Wind,’ anyhow! Then they handed me out another just for fun, to keep up the atmosphere of the camp, as they said.”

“And what’s that one?” asked Kitty Sill, her brown eyes feasting themselves upon the water-pommeled figures of girls about her own age.

“Let’s see now! Can I remember it? Something like Men-o-ki-gá-bo; yes, I guess that’s it!”

“An’ what on earth does that mean?”

“‘Standing Tall!’ Ain’t that a bully name?” The mariner reared his massive bulk with a highly amused twinkle in his eye which surveyed the bathers, too. “Fancy me play-acting with Indian names at my age, when I’m cruising toward seventy! But it pleases them an’ don’t hurt me. The Morning-Glory chose the latter name, the girl I was speaking to you about yesterday. There she goes, diving nigh on fifteen feet off that high rock; she dives as well as dances like a foam-chicken! You stick to her like a limpet, little Kitty, if you’re shy-like among the strange girls, and I’ll warrant you’ll soon feel at home! But I guess you will with any of them; they’re a kind-hearted tribe.”

“Tell me some more of their dressing-up names!” Kitty shook her laundered ribbons. The little brown troutlet leaped in the sunlight in her blinking eyes, but it was an eager, not a perverse, minnow now; greedy for the bait of a new interest.

“Oh, tooraloo! Ask me an easy one. Well, I guess I can make a hit at the name of that tall girl that’s toeing the water there on the edge of the beach, making up her mind to go in; I wrote her Camp Fire name down because I considered it the best of the bunch.” Captain Andy took a penciled slip from his vest pocket. “U-l-i-d-a-h-á-s-u!” he spelled out slowly. “That’s a Penobscot Indian word cut down from one of fifteen letters and it means ‘Peace’; she wants to be a peacemaker, that girl, to do her bit now an’ when she grows up toward bringing peace everywhere. She has a dove in her head-band.”

“Who’s the girl with the red cheeks—an’——?”

“And the scream like a curlew! Can’t tell you her dressing-up name, Kitty. But her ordinary one is Penelope, with a kind of extraordinary surname: Tingle, an’ gee! she is one big tingle, was about as mild-mannered as a hurricane when she came here first, but she’s simmering down a little, by degrees. See that dark-haired girl who’s sitting on the steps of the biggest camp building—Camp Morning-Glory they call it?” The captain wheeled shoreward and looked toward a scattered trio of new camps, lightly built frame houses, in a curve of the white crescent beach.

“The one who has just come out of the water and taken the handkerchief off her head?” Kitty inquired.

“Yes, she’s one of the rich girls I spoke of. The first time I saw her she talked some frilly stuff about going to an hotel, she and her sister, an’ dancing all summer—something like that—now she foots it an’ sings with the rest of the girls and cooks an’ launders, and learns how to run a motor-boat and pull a good oar, too, an’ thinks it all a lark. Her father has millions, I guess, and wears a mite o’ pink ribbon on his coat that makes him look like a foreign di-plo-mat—I heard him speechify after a public dinner when I was in the city of Clevedon about three weeks ago.”

“What’s that for?” inquired Kitty’s laundered ribbons waving in the sea-breeze and taking the words from her lips.

“The scrap o’ ribbon! Why! to show that his ancestors did truly come over here on the Mayflower—as yours an’ mine did, Kitty, for the matter o’ that, on a bunchy old hooker called the Angel Gabriel. That girl’s name is Olive Deering; her mother was a beautiful Southerner, so I understand, an’ the girl herself is, as a seaman would say, A. I. in p’int of looks from her keel to her truck-head!” Captain Andy chuckled.

A slow swish of wings in the air! A great bird rising majestically from the water’s edge where it had been feeding on fish at a point where the tidal ripples broke gently upon the white sands that gleamed through them like milk in a crystal vase.

Kitty turned eagerly to watch its flight toward the dunes, the white expanse of sand-hills, some of which were sand-snows right to the top that rose to two hundred feet, or thereabouts, above sea level; others shone with the faint pink of delicate flesh owing to the shadow cast by the vegetation, the sparse grass that stood up like the scanty hair on a baby’s head.

The deep hollows between the peaks were pink and purple with the riotous, blossoming beach-pea or emerald with low trees and shrubs, basswood, bitter-sweet, bayberry and barberry.

One sand-valley held a crystal basin left by the tide where a score of sandpipers were bathing.

Over all sailed the magnificent bird—great wings heavily flapping—like a grey slate against the sky, in length measuring about four feet from the tip of its six-inch beak to the end-feather of its insignificant tail, its little yellow eye slanting down sidelong on Kitty, which, of course, she could not see, its long neck gracefully stretched.

“Know what bird that is?” asked her granduncle.

“Some sort of crane.” So the fluttering ribbon again made answer, playing with her reply.

“‘Crane!’ Balderdash! It’s a great Blue Heron. See ’em pretty often round here! There were three of ’em standing in a row upon this beach at the very time that I landed my first boat-load of Camp Fire Girls here—looked just as if the birds were lined up on deck for a welcome.”

“How funny!” cried Kitty, showing her dimples.

“Say! but it tickled the girls. The birds flew off, but slowly; they seem to know the law protects ’em now. One of the girls, the very one we were talking about, got so excited that she came near upsetting the rowboat I was landing them in. She cried out that, when she was initiated, she was going to take the Blue Heron for her Camp Fire name because it had such a splendid spread o’ wings. I shouldn’t wonder if she first thought of becoming a Camp Fire Girl through seeing an old owl, with a goose’s head on his shoulders, that could neither fly nor hoot, had lost his natural powers through not using them.”

“Do the other girls call her the Blue Heron?”

“They call her by the Indian word for it. You come along over now and we’ll ask her what that is!” Captain Andy began a strategic move forward in the direction of Camp Morning-Glory.

Kitty began a crab-like backward one.

“No-o! I don’t know any girls like her and her sister (isn’t that the sister sitting near her on the sands?)—they’re too grand for me, eh?” Her dimples fluctuated tentatively.

“Grand! Fiddlestick! Is it of the money or the Mayflower emblem you’re thinking, child? Pshaw, Kittykins”—the captain let out his deep, droll laugh—“I guess you can come near matching that last any day, with your old chimney built for five smokes! I’ve read the builder’s contract myself, dated 1718, for that big T-shaped chim............