August went out and September came in. Harvest was ended; and though summer was not yet gone, her face was turned westering. The asters lettered her retreating footsteps in a purple script, and over the hills and valleys hung a faint blue smoke, as if Nature were worshipping at her woodland altar. The apples began to burn red on the bending ; crickets sang day and night; squirrels secrets of Polichinelle in the spruces; the sunshine was as thick and yellow as molten gold; school opened, and we small of the hill farms lived happy days of harmless work and necessary play, closing in nights of peaceful, undisturbed under a roof watched over by autumnal stars.  
At least, our were peaceful and undisturbed until our orgy of dreaming began.
 
"I would really like to know what especial kind of deviltry you young fry are up to this time," said Uncle Roger one evening, as he passed through the with his gun on his shoulder, bound for the swamp.
 
We were sitting in a circle before the Pulpit Stone, each writing in an exercise book, and eating the . Mr. Scott's plums, which always reached their prime of juicy, golden-green flesh and bloomy blue skin in September. The Rev. Mr. Scott was dead and gone, but those plums certainly kept his memory green, as his forgotten sermons could never have done.
 
"Oh," said Felicity in a shocked tone, when Uncle Roger had passed by, "Uncle Roger SWORE."
 
"Oh, no, he didn't," said the Story Girl quickly. "'Deviltry' isn't swearing at all. It only means extra bad ."
 
"Well, it's not a very nice word, anyhow," said Felicity.
 
"No, it isn't," agreed the Story Girl with a regretful sigh. "It's very , but it isn't nice. That is the way with so many words. They're expressive, but they're not nice, and so a girl can't use them"
 
The Story Girl sighed again. She loved expressive words, and treasured them as some girls might have treasured jewels. To her, they were as pearls, threaded on the cord of a vivid fancy. When she met with a new one she uttered it over and over to herself in , weighing it, it, infusing it with the radiance of her voice, making it her own in all its possibilities for ever.
 
"Well, anyhow, it isn't a suitable word in this case," insisted
Felicity. "We are not up to any dev—any extra bad mischief.
Writing down one's dreams isn't mischief at all."
Certainly it wasn't. Surely not even the straitest of the grown-ups could call it so. If writing down your dreams, with care as to composition and spelling—for who knew that the eyes of generations unborn might not read the record?—were not a harmless amusement, could anything be called so? I trow not.
 
We had been at it for a fortnight, and during that time we only lived to have dreams and write them down. The Story Girl had originated the idea one evening in the , rain-wet ways of the spruce wood, where we were picking gum after a day of showers. When we had picked enough, we sat down on the moss-grown stones at the end of a long , where it opened out on the harvest-golden valley below us, our exercising themselves vigorously on the spoil of our climbings. We were never allowed to chew gum in school or in company, but in wood and field, orchard and hayloft, such rules were in .
 
"My Aunt Jane used to say it wasn't polite to chew gum anywhere," said Peter rather ruefully.
 
"I don't suppose your Aunt Jane knew all the rules of ," said Felicity, designing to crush Peter with a big word, borrowed from the Family Guide. But Peter was not to be so crushed. He had in him a certain toughness of fibre, that would have been proof against a whole dictionary.
 
"She did, too," he retorted. "My Aunt Jane was a real lady, even if she was only a Craig. She knew all those rules and she kept them when there was nobody round to see her, just the same as when any one was. And she was smart. If father had had half her git-up-and-git I wouldn't be a hired boy to-day."
 
"Have you any idea where your father is?" asked Dan.
 
"No," said Peter indifferently. "The last we heard of him he was in the Maine woods. But that was three years ago. I don't know where he is now, and," added Peter , taking his gum from his mouth to make his statement more impressive, "I don't care."
 
"Oh, Peter, that sounds dreadful," said Cecily. "Your own father!"
 
"Well," said Peter , "if your own father had run away when you was a baby, and left your mother to earn her living by washing and working out, I guess you wouldn't care much about him either."
 
"Perhaps your father may come home some of these days with a huge fortune," suggested the Story Girl.
 
"Perhaps pigs may whistle, but they've poor mouths for it," was all the answer Peter to this charming suggestion.
 
"There goes Mr. Campbell down the road," said Dan. "That's his new . Isn't she a dandy? She's got a skin like black satin. He calls her Betty Sherman."
 
"I don't think it's very nice to call a horse after your own grandmother," said Felicity.
 
"Betty Sherman would have thought it a compliment," said the
Story Girl.
"Maybe she would. She couldn't have been very nice herself, or she would never have gone and asked a man to marry her," said Felicity.
 
"Why not?"
&nbs............