Margaret Penrose - The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - or, a Strange Message from the Air

“Oh, it’s wonderful, Amy! Just wonderful!”

The blonde girl in the porch swing looked up with shining eyes and flushed face from her magazine to look at the dark girl who swung composedly in a rocking chair, her nimble fingers busy with the knitting of a shoulder scarf. The dark girl bobbed her head in agreement.

“So’s the Sphinx, but it’s awfully out of date, Jess.”

Jessie Norwood looked offended. “Did I ever bring to your attention, Miss Drew–”

“Why don’t you say ‘drew’ to my attention?” murmured the other girl.

“Because I perfectly loathe puns,” declared Jessie, with energy.

“Good! Miss Seymour’s favorite pupil. Go on about the wonder beast, Jess.”

“It is no beast, I’d have you understand. And it is right up to date – the very newest thing.”

“My dear Jessie,” urged her chum, gayly, “you have tickled my curiosity until it positively wriggles! What is the wonder?”

“Radio!”

“Oh! Wireless?”

“Wireless telephone. Everybody is having one.”

“Grandma used to prescribe sulphur and molasses for that.”

“Do be sensible for once, Amy Drew. You and Darry–”

“That reminds me. Darry knows all about it.”

“About what?”

“The radio telephone business. You know he was eighteen months on a destroyer in the war, even if he was only a kid. You know,” and Amy giggled, “he says that if women’s ages are always elastic, it was no crime for him to stretch his age when he enlisted. Anyhow, he knows all about the ‘listening boxes’ down in the hold. And that is all this radio is.”

“Oh, but Amy!” cried Jessie, with a toss of her blond head, “that is old stuff. The radio of to-day is very different – much improved. Anybody can have a receiving set and hear the most wonderful things out of the air. It has been brought to every home.”

“‘Have you a little radio in your home?’” chuckled Amy, her fingers still flying.

“Dear me, Amy, you are so difficult,” sighed her chum.

“Not at all, not at all,” replied the other girl. “You can understand me, just as e-e-easy! But you know, Jess, I have to act as a brake for your exuberance.”

“Don’t care,” declared Jessie. “I’m going to have one.”

“If cook isn’t looking, bring one for me, too,” suggested the irrepressible joker.

“I mean to have a radio set,” repeated Jessie quite seriously. “It says in this magazine article that one can erect the aerials and all, oneself. And place the instrument. I am going to do it.”

“Sure you can,” declared Amy, with confidence. “If you said you could rebuild the Alps – and improve on them – I’d root for you, honey.”

“I don’t want any of your joking,” declared Jessie, with emphasis. “I am in earnest.”

“So am I. About the Alps. Aunt Susan, who went over this year, says the traveling there is just as rough as it was before the war. She doesn’t see that the war did any good. If I were you, Jess, and thought of making over the Alps–”

“Now, Amy Drew! Who said anything about the Alps?”

“I did,” confessed her chum. “And I was about to suggest that, if you tackle the job of rebuilding them, you flatten ’em out a good bit so Aunt Susan can get across them easier.”

“Amy Drew! Will you ever have sense?”

“What is it, a conundrum? Something about ‘Take care of the dollars and the cents will take care of themselves?’”

“I am talking about installing a radio set in our house. And if you don’t stop funning and help me do it, I won’t let you listen in, so there!”

“I’ll be good,” proclaimed Amy at once. “I enjoy gossip just as much as the next one. And if you can get it out of the air–”

“It has to be sent from a broadcasting station,” announced Jessie.

“There’s one right in this town,” declared Amy, with vigor.

“No!”

“Yes, I tell you. She lives in the second house from the corner of Breen Street, the yellow house with green blinds–”

“Now, Amy! Listen here! Never mind local gossips. They only broadcast neighborhood news. But we can get concerts and weather reports and lectures–”

Amy painfully writhed in her chair at this point. “Say not so, Jess!” she begged. “Get lectures enough at school – and from dad, once in a while, when the dear thinks I go too far.”

“I think you go too far most of the time,” declared her chum primly. “Nobody else would have the patience with you that I have.”

“Except Burd Alling,” announced Amy composedly. “He thinks I am all right.”

“Pooh! Whoever said Burd Alling had good sense?” demanded Jessie. “Now listen!” She read a long paragraph from the magazine article. “You see, it is the very latest thing to do. Everybody is doing it. And it is the most wonderful thing!”

Amy had listened with more seriousness. She could be attentive and appreciative if she wished. The paragraph her chum read was interesting.

“Go ahead. Read some more,” she said. “Is that all sure enough so, Jess?”

“Of course it is so. Don’t you see it is printed here?”

“You mustn’t believe everything you see in print, Jess. My grandfather was reported killed in the Civil War, and he came home and pointed out several things they had got wrong in the newspaper obituary – especially the date of his demise. Now this–”

“I am going to get a book about it, and that will tell us just what to do in getting a radio set established.”

“I’ll tell you the first thing to do,” scoffed Amy. “Dig down into your pocketbook.”

“It won’t cost much. But I mean to have a good one.”

“All right, dear. I am with you. Never let it be said I deserted Poll. What is the first move?”

“Now, let me see,” murmured Jessie, staring off across the sunflecked lawn.

The Norwood estate was a grand place. The house, with its surrounding porches, stood in Roselawn upon a knoll with several acres of sloping sod surrounding it and a lovely little lake at the side. There was a long rose garden on either side of the house, and groups of summer roses in front. Roses, roses, roses, everywhere about the place! The Norwoods all loved them.

But there were more roses in this section of the pretty town of New Melford, and on that account many inhabitants of the place had gotten into the habit of calling the estates bordering the boulevard by the name of Roselawn. It was the Roselawn district, for every lawn was dotted with roses, red, pink, white, and yellow.

The Norwoods were three. Jessie, we put first because to us she is of the most importance, and her father and mother would agree. Being the only child, it is true they made much of her. But Jessie Norwood was too sweet to be easily spoiled.

Her father was a lawyer in New York, which was twenty miles from New Melford. The Norwoods had some wealth, which was good. They had culture, which was better. And they were a very loving and companionable trio, which was best.

Across the broad, shaded boulevard was a great, rambling, old house, with several broad chimneys. It had once been a better class farmstead. Mr. Wilbur Drew, who was likewise a lawyer, had rebuilt and added to and improved and otherwise transformed the farmhouse until it was an attractive and important-looking dwelling.

In it lived the lawyer and his wife, his daughter, Amy, and Darrington Drew, when he was home from college. This was another happy family – in a way. Yet they were just a little different from the Norwoods. But truly “nice people.”