“Hurrah! Isn’t it fun to see our bonfire put the stars out?”
It was Dorothy who gave vent to this extinguisher, piling on more dry brush and resinous pine logs until not a spark in the firmament, planet or fixed star, dared to vie with the blaze below—upon the wild mountain top.
“And when it dies down a little and the flames blow aside, you can see old Orion, up there, stretched lazily, on watch,” said the Guardian. “Well! whose ear is the most nearly roasted? I don’t mean an auricular cavity,” laughingly. “I mean ‘Mondamin.’”
Mondamin, great Corn Spirit, they were toasting him, in style, upon the summit of Mount Pocohosette, while the two lesser peaks, Little Brother and Little Sister Mountain, as the girls called them, retired into the shadows of right and left.
Carrying, each, half-a-dozen ears of the sweet, early corn, in its coat of bishop’s purple, procured from the outskirts of the horse-farm, the girls had climbed the mountain in the golden September afternoon, by a trail which sidetracking Balcony and precipice, led almost to the very top.
Twenty-six hundred steep feet above sea level, fifteen hundred above their cosy camp upon the sidehill, with its exciting proximity to the Long Pasture, they had cut down wood with their Camp Fire axes, piled high the brush—for it takes much fuel to toast Mondamin—and brought water wherewith to wash him down, from a little lake of the clouds which could almost compete with the famous one of that name upon Mount Mansfield.
Mount Mansfield, giant of the Green Mountains, they had waved him goodnight before their bonfire put out the stars, so that lazy Orion’s nose was, for the most part, out of joint.
A teakettle sang its song upon a little red nest of its own, to the right of the main blaze, around which eighteen girls, each with a browning corn-ear upon the end of a stick, were preparing the jolly corn roast.
The first corn roast of the season—above the clouds!
The wind, now sibilant, soft, now swelling to a summit roar, sang through dark spruce and mountain ash of the heights—bringing out the red cheeks of the latter, the ripening berry clusters.
The mystery of night, young night, the girls had never before so felt it—so reveled in it.