“I’ll tell it,” said Nyoda submissively, alarmed at this threat. “You see, it was this way,” she began in a pained, plaintive voice. “This Gladys woman over here came up to take supper with me last night—only she smelled the supper cooking in the kitchen and turned up her nose, whereupon I was moved with compassion to cook supper for her in my chafing-dish unbeknownst to the landlady, who has been known to frown on any attempts to compete with her table d’hôte.”

“I never!” murmured Gladys. “She invited me to a chafing-dish supper in the first place.”

“Well, as I was saying,” continued Nyoda, not heeding this interruption, “to save her from starvation I dragged out my chafing-dish and made shrimp wiggle and creamed peas, and we had a dinner fit for a king, if I do say it as shouldn’t. The crowning glory of the feast was a big onion which Gladys’s delicate appetite required as a stimulant. All went merry as a marriage bell until it came to the disposal of that onion after the feast was over, as there was more than half of it left. We didn’t dare take it down to the kitchen for fear the Widder would pounce on us for cooking in our rooms, and even my stout heart quailed at the thought of sleeping ferninst that fragrant vegetable. Suddenly I had an inspiration.” Here Nyoda paused dramatically.

“Yes,” broke in Gladys, impatient at her pause, “and she calmly chucked it out of the second story window into the street!”

“All would still have been mild and melodious,” continued Nyoda, in a solemn tone which enthralled her hearers, “if it hadn’t been for the fact that the fates had their fingers crossed at me last night. How otherwise could it have happened that at the exact moment when the onion descended the old bachelor missionary should have been prancing up the walk, coming to call on the Widder Higgins? Who but fate could have brought it about that that onion should bounce first on his hat, then on his nose, and then on his manly bosom?”

“And he never waited to see what hit him!” put in Gladys, for whom the recital was not going fast enough. “He ran as if he thought somebody had thrown a bomb at him.”

“And the Widder Higgins was standing behind the lace curtain watching his approach with maidenly reserve,” resumed Nyoda, “and so had a box seat view of the tragedy, and the last act of the drama was a moving one, I can assure you.”

“Oh, Nyoda,” cried Hinpoha and Sahwah and Migwan, pointing their fingers at her, “a nice person you are to be Guardian of the Winnebagos! Fine example you are setting your youthful flock! You need a guardian worse than any of us!”

“Do as you like with me,” said Nyoda, covering her face with her hands in mock shame, whereupon Hinpoha and Migwan and Gladys fell upon her neck with one accord.

“But we haven’t named this house yet,” said Nyoda, uncovering her face and smoothing out her black hair.

“I thought of a name while you were telling about the onion,” said Migwan. “It’s Onoway House.”

“What does that mean?” asked Nyoda.

“It’s a symbolic word, like Wohelo,” said Migwan. “It’s made from the words, Only One Way. You see there was only one way of getting that money to go to college and that was by coming here.”

“I think that is a very good name,” said Nyoda. “It is clever as well as pretty. It sounds like the song, ‘Onaway, awake beloved,’ from Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.”

“It sounds like the water going over the stones in the river,” said romantic Hinpoha.

And so Onoway House was named.

CHAPTER II.—NEIGHBORS.

Onoway House stood on the Centerville Road, on a farm of about four acres. All of the land was not worked, just the part that was laid out as a garden and a small orchard of peach trees. The rest was open meadow running down to the river. It had originally been a much larger farm—Old Deacon Waterhouse’s place—but after his death it had been divided up and sold in sections. Onoway House was the original home built by the deacon when he bought the farm as a young man. It was a very old place, large and rambling, and full of queer corners and passageways, and a big echoing cobwebby attic, crowded with old furniture and trunks. The house had been sold with all its furnishings at the Deacon’s death, and the old things were still in the rooms when the Bartletts bought it twenty-five years later. This made it unnecessary for the Gardiners, when they came, to bring any of their own furniture. The Bartletts had never lived on the place, hiring a caretaker to work the garden, and it was the sudden departure of this man that had given Migwan her chance.

On either side of Onoway House was a farm of much larger proportions. To the right there stood a big, homelike looking farmhouse painted white, with porches and vines and a lawn in front running down to the road; on the left was a smaller house, painted dark red, with a vegetable bed in front. The garden at Onoway House had been given a good start and the strawberries and asparagus and sundry other vegetables were ready to market when Migwan took possession. The Winnebagos looked on the gardening as a grand lark and pitched in with a will to help Migwan make her fortune from the ground.

“Did you ever see anything half so delicate as this little new pea-vine?” asked Migwan, puttering happily over one of the long beds.

“Or anything half so indelicate as this plantain bush?” asked Nyoda, busily grubbing weeds. “‘Scarce reared above the parent earth thy tender form,’” she quoted, “‘and yet with a root three times as long as the hair of Claire de Lorme!’”

“Burns would relish hearing that line of his applied to weeds,” said Migwan, laughing. “I wonder what he would have written if he had turned up a plantain weed with his plough instead of a mountain daisy.”

“He wouldn’t have turned up a plantain weed,” said Nyoda, with a vicious thrust of the long knife with which she was weeding, “it would have turned him up.”

Migwan rose from the ground slowly and painfully. “Oh dear,” she sighed, “I wonder if Burns ever got as stiff in the joints from close contact with Nature as I am?”

“He certainly must have,” observed Nyoda, straining her muscles to uproot the weedy homesteader, “haven’t you ever heard the slogan, ‘Omega Oil for Burns?’”

Migwan laughed as she straightened up and held her aching back. “Earth gets its price for what earth gives us,” she quoted, with a mixture of ruefulness and humor.

“Listen to the poetry floating around on the breeze,” cried Sahwah, passing them as she ran the wheel hoe up and down between the rows of plants.

    “Come  and  trip  it  as  you  go
    On  the  light  fantastic  hoe,”

she sang. “Oh, I say,” she called over her shoulder, “do I have to hoe up the surface of the river around the watercress, too?”

“You certainly do,” said Nyoda gravely, “and while you’re at it just loosen up the air around that air fern of Mrs. Gardiner’s.” Sahwah made a grimace and trundled off with her wheel hoe.

“Are you looking for any field hands?” called a cheery voice. The girls looked up to see a white-haired, pleasant-faced old man of about seventy years standing in the garden. “My name’s Landsdowne, Farmer Landsdowne,” he said by way of introduction, with a friendly smile, which included all the girls at once, “and I’ve come to have a look at the new caretaker.”

“I’m the one,” said Migwan, stepping