"Or for an ogre," returned Marian. "It sounds like a feast for giants. Yet a burgoo sounds even fiercer and more barbaric. I shall ask the commodore what it means, the minute he comes. Wasn't he a dear to think of taking us?"
Bright and early, even as he had promised, Mr. McCloskey's trig little launch puffed up to the camp landing. The commodore, arrayed as Solomon in snowy linen, a red tie, and a large Panama, waved greeting. Beside him sat Mrs. McCloskey, her sweet little old face beaming under her crisp frilled sunbonnet.
The two girls stepped aboard, with Finnegan prancing joyfully after. For to-day the Burford babies were to stay at home with Mammy, while Finnegan was to attend the burgoo, a specially bidden guest.
"And now, Mr. McCloskey! Tell us quick! What may a burgoo be?"
"A burgoo?" Commodore McCloskey reflected. "Well, then, so ye don't know a burgoo by experience. Wherever was ye brought up? A burgoo is a burgoo, sure. 'Tis the only word in the English language that describes it. 'Tis sack-races, an' pole-climbin', an' merry-go-rounds, an' pink limonade, an' a brass band, an' kettles full of b'iled chicken an' gravy, an' more mortial things to eat than the tongue of man can name. Ye must see it to understand the real po'try of it. For the half of it could not be told to you."
The commodore was quite right. The burgoo was all that he had claimed, and more. At least two hundred people, gay in their Sunday best, had already gathered at the county picnic grounds, a beautiful open woodland several miles up the Illinois River. Vendors of candy and popcorn, toy balloons and pink lemonade, shouted their wares. A vast merry-go-round wheezed and sputtered; the promised brass band awoke the river echoes. And, swung in a mighty rank above a row of camp-fires cleverly built in a broad shallow trench, the burgoo kettles sizzled and steamed.
"Burgoo," the girls soon learned, is the local name for a delicious stew of chicken and bacon and vegetables, cooked slowly for hours, then served in wooden bowls with huge dill pickles and corn pone. Sally Lou, housekeeper born, wheedled the head cook, a courteous, grizzled old negro, into giving her the recipe. Marian, chuckling inwardly, heard his painstaking reply.