I wish Katy could have seen him." Life at St.Helen's in the winter season is never dull; but the gayest fortnight of all was when, late in January, the High Valley partners deserted their duties and came in for a visit to the Hopes.

All sorts of small festivities had been saved for this special fortnight, and among the rest, Clover and Phil gave a party.
"If you can squeeze into the dining-room, and if you can do with just cream-toast for tea," she explained, "it would be such fun to have you come.

I can't give you anything to eat to speak of, because I haven't any cook, you know; but you can all eat a great deal of dinner, and then you won't starve." Thurber Wade, the Hopes, Clarence, Geoff, Marian, and Alice made a party of nine, and it was hard work indeed to squeeze so many into the tiny dining-room of No.13.The very difficulties, however, made it all the jollier.

Clover's cream-toast,--which she prepared before their eyes on the blazer,--her little tarts made of crackers split, buttered, and toasted brown with a spoonful of raspberry jam in each, and the big loaf of hot ginger-bread to be eaten with thick cream from the High Valley, were pronounced each in its way to be absolute perfection.

Clarence and Phil kindly volunteered to "shunt the dishes" into the kitchen after the repast was concluded; and they gathered round the fire to play "twenty questions" and "stage-coach," and all manner of what Clover called "lead-pencil games,"-- "crambo" and "criticism" and "anagrams" and "consequences." There was immense laughter over some of these, as, for instance, when Dr.Hope was reported as having met Mrs.Watson in the North Cheyenne Canyon, and he said that knowledge is power; and she, that when larks flew round ready roasted poor folks could stick a fork in; and the consequence was that they eloped together to a Cannibal Island where each suffered a process of disillusionation, and the world said it was the natural result of osculation.