"Suits ye, does it?" asked the strange girl. "I flatter myself them biscuits air light enough to sleep on."
"They are a good deal more feathery than our "downy couches" here in camp, I warrant, Lizzie," laughed Laura.
"Glad ye like "em. There"s plenty of biscuits--don"t be bashful."
Jess giggled when she saw Lil"s face. "How rude!" muttered Miss Pendleton. "I don"t see what you and Mother Wit were thinking about when you hired that girl."
"Thinking of you, Lily--thinking of you," declared Jess. "She will willingly do your share of the dish-washing."
"Dish-washing? Fancy!" exclaimed Lil. "I"d like to see myself!"
"Well I wouldn"t," put in the omnipresent Bobby. "Not if I had to eat after your manipulation of the dish-mop."
"But we didn"t come to do anything like _that_," wailed Lil.
"Just the same we have got to do a part of the camp work," declared Mother Wit. "It all can"t be shoved off onto Lizzie."
"Let us arrange about that right here and now," suggested Mrs. Morse.
"Oh, Mrs. Morse!" cried Nell, eagerly. "First of all I vote that Mrs.
Morse is not called upon to do a thing! She"s company as well as chaperon."
"I will make my own bed," said the lady, smiling. "You girls can take turns sweeping and dusting the cabin, if you like."
"And making the beds and cleaning up our tent," added Laura. "Two at a time--it won"t seem so hard if two work together."
"A good idea," agreed Mrs. Morse.
"But that leaves an odd girl," suggested Jess.
"We"ll change about. The odd girl shall help the cook. And one meal a day--either breakfast, dinner, or supper--we girls must cook, and Lizzie is going to have nothing to do with that meal."
"Why! _I_ can"t cook," wailed Lil again.
"Good time for you to begin to learn, then," Laura said, laughingly.
Some of the other girls looked disturbed at the prospect. "I can make fudge," observed Nell, honestly, "but I never really tried anything else, except to make toast and tea for mother when she was ill and the maid was out."
"Listen to that!" exclaimed the voice of Lizzie Bean, who had been listening frankly to the dialogue. "An" I been doin" plain cookin" an"
heavy sweepin" and hard scrubbin" ever since I was knee-high to a toadstool!"
Bobby burst out laughing. "So have I, Lizzie!" she cried. "Only I have done it for Father Tom and my kid brothers and sisters when Mrs.
Betsey was sick."
Lily Pendleton turned up her nose--literally. "We"re going to have trouble with that girl," she announced to Nellie. "She doesn"t know her place."
But whatever Lizzie knew, or did not know, she did not shirk her share of the work. She stayed up after everybody else had retired and washed every pot and pan and plate, and set her bread to rise for morning, and stirred up a big pitcher of flapjack flour to rise over night, peeled potatoes to fry, leaving them in cold water so they would not turn black, and set the long table fresh for breakfast.
When the earliest riser among the girls (who was Laura herself) peeped into the cooking tent at daybreak, the fire in the stove was already roaring, and Lizzie had gone down to the sh.o.r.e to wash her face and hands in the cold water. Laura ran down in her bathing suit.
"What do you think of this place, Lizzie?" she asked the solemn-faced girl.
"For the land"s sake, Miss!" drawled Lizzie Bean, "I never had no idea the woods was so lonesome--for a fac"."
"No?"
"I sh"d say not! I went to bed and lay there an" listened. The trees creaked, and the crickets twittered, and some bird had the nightmare an" kep" cryin" like a baby----"
"I expect that was a screech-owl, Lizzie," interrupted Laura. "They come out only at night."
"Goodness to gracious! Do they come out _every_ night?" demanded the girl.
"I expect so."
"And them frogs?"
"They are tree-toads. Yes, they are here all summer, I guess."
"Goodness to gracious! And folks like to live in the woods? Well!"
"Do you think you can stand it?" queried Laura, much amused, yet somewhat anxious, too.
"As long as I"m goin" to get all that money every week it"ll take more than birds with the nightmare an" a pa.s.sel of frogs to drive me away.
Now! when do you want breakfast, Miss?"
"Not until Mrs. Morse gets up. And none of the other girls are out yet," said Laura.
But very soon the other girls began to appear. They had agreed to have a dip the first thing, and the girls who first got into the water squealed so because of the cold, that it routed out the lie-abeds.
Lily would not venture in. She sat on a stump, with a blanket wrapped around her, and shivered, and yawned, and refused to plunge in with the others.
"And it"s so early," she complained. "I had no idea you"d all get up so early and make such a racket. Why, when there isn"t school, I _never_ get up before nine o"clock."
"Ah! how different your life is going to be on Acorn Island," said Bobby, frankly. "You"ll be a new girl by the time we go back home."
"I don"t want to be a new girl," grumbled Lily.
"Now, isn"t that just like her?" said Bobby, _sotto voce_. "She is perfectly satisfied with herself as she is. Humph! Lucky she _is_ satisfied, I s"pose, for n.o.body else could be!"
CHAPTER XI
LIZ SEES A "HA"NT"
After their bath the girls got into their gymnasium costumes. Then they clamored for breakfast, and had Mrs. Morse not appeared just then there certainly would have been a riot at the cook-tent. Lizzie was a stickler for orders, and she would not begin to fry cakes until Jess"