CHAPTER 1 A Brownie Wish

ALL morning the forest had echoed with laughter. The Brownie Scouts—six of them—together with their leader, Miss Gordon, were enjoying a weekly hike through the metropolitan natural park.

Sure-footed, the girls had roamed over the many trails, lingering by the brook and tossing stones from the rustic bridge.

Now as the sun rose higher, they played their favorite game of identifying trees.

“Oh, that beautiful one directly ahead is a walnut!” declared Connie Williams.

The little girl was a leader in the Rosedale Brownie Troop and very bright at school. However, all the girls liked her for she never tried to show off.

“Oh, I don’t think it’s a walnut tree!” exclaimed Veve McGuire.

The dark-haired, freckled girl lived next door to Connie. Sometimes, just for the fun of it, she disagreed with her friend.

“It’s an oak tree!” chimed in Jane Tuttle, tossing her long yellow braids.

A hoot arose from the other Brownies, Sunny Davidson, Eileen Webber and Rosemary Fritche. Jane, they knew, nearly always was wrong about trees.

“It couldn’t be an oak,” insisted Eileen. “The leaves are shaped all wrong.”

Sunny appealed to Miss Gordon. “What kind of tree do you say it is?” she demanded. “An oak or a walnut?”

“A walnut,” replied the Brownie leader. “But then, I could be mistaken. Let’s look at the identification tag.”

Nearly all of the largest trees in the park had been marked with their correct names. The girls enjoyed making their own guesses, and then checking to see if they were correct.

Before Connie could do so, Veve darted ahead to read the tag on the tree trunk.

“Ha!” she cried. “Everyone is wrong! It isn’t a walnut and it isn’t an oak. It’s a Liriodendron tulipifera!”

“Oh, that’s the scientific name,” laughed Miss Gordon.

“It says tulip tree underneath,” revealed Veve.

“A tulip?” repeated the Brownie Scout leader, deeply puzzled. “That’s odd. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t look a bit like a tulip tree.”

“Aren’t the leaves of a tulip dark green and very glossy?” inquired Connie. She felt quite crestfallen to have made a mistake.

“I always thought so,” replied Miss Gordon. “Also, the leaves of a tulip usually are restless, almost like those of a poplar tree. Apparently though, I’m not as clever about recognizing varieties of trees as I thought.”

Starting on down the trail, the Brownies soon came to another interesting-looking specimen.

“Well, there at least is a tree that no one can mistake,” declared the Brownie leader. “Who agrees with me that it’s a red maple?”

“I do!” laughed Connie.

“Of course!” shouted Jane. “No one can mistake a maple.”

As the girls approached the beautiful, slender tree, Miss Gordon told them that at every season the red maple had distinguishing characteristics.

“Even during winter, the twigs shine as if covered with red varnish,” the teacher explained.

Each leaf, she added, had from three to five points, often with red stems.

“I’m going to gather some of the leaves for my notebook,” declared Eileen. “I want to find one that is changing color.”

Although frost had not yet come, the weather had turned somewhat chilly. The Brownies noticed that many of the trees were beginning to shed their leaves. Others were turning yellow, gold and rusty brown.

In the act of picking up an especially pretty leaf from the ground, Eileen chanced to glance at the tag tacked to the tree trunk.

“Say! This isn’t a maple tree!” she exclaimed.

“Go on!” Sunny retorted. “Don’t try to kid us!”

“Read the tag for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

The other Brownies clustered about Sunny. In amazement they read that the tree was a white ash.

“But that’s utterly impossible!” protested Miss Gordon. “Why, I never in my life failed to recognize a red maple!”

“We have a white ash tree in our yard at home,” contributed Rosemary. “It has seed pods and the leaves droop. This tree doesn’t look one bit like our white ash.”

“I thought I could recognize nearly all of the more common trees,” wailed Connie. “Now I’m mixed up.”

“We’re all mixed up,” said Miss Gordon. “I simply can’t understand it. Do you suppose the tags could have been exchanged?”

“Maybe the pixies did it!” laughed Sunny. She liked to say she believed in fairies, although she knew none actually existed.

Deeply puzzled, the Brownie Scouts resumed their hike.

Coming presently to a giant oak tree, they selected the site for their picnic ground. The brisk morning walk through the wild park area had made the girls very hungry. Eagerly they spread out the lunch.

“What a beautiful oak!” Connie said dreamily, gazing up into the leafy branches.

“Are you sure it’s an oak?” teased Jane, biting into a peanut butter sandwich. “There’s no identification tag.”

“In that case, I’m sure!” chuckled Connie. “Don’t you say it’s an oak, Miss Gordon?”

The teacher agreed with her that it was. “I can’t understand our mistake about those other trees,” she added, frowning thoughtfully. “When we leave the park area, I intend to stop at the caretaker’s house and talk to him about it.”

After finishing their lunch, the Brownies rested for a while beneath the rugged old tree.

“Tell us a story, Miss Gordon,” Rosemary urged, stretching lazily on the grass.

“One about fairies,” added Sunny.

“May we hear the story about the Brownies?” pleaded Veve. “The one upon which our Brownie Scout organization is based?”

The girls had heard this tale many times, but never tired of having it repeated.

So, starting off “Once upon a time in old England,” Miss Gordon launched forth into the story of how a little girl and a boy named Mary and Tommy learned to be helpful in their home.

She told of their visit to the wise old owl in the forest and their plea that he instruct them how to find the brownies who once did all the family work.

“Hoot! Hoot!” said Veve, pretending that she was the owl. “I know of two brownies that live in your house right now!”

“In my house?” echoed Connie, taking on the part of Mary, the little girl.

“In your house,” repeated Veve. “But they are idle.”

“How can we find those brownies?”

“I’ll tell you how to find one of them,” said Veve, the owl. “Go to the pool in the woods and turn yourself around three times, saying this charm:

“Twist me and turn me and show me the elf,

I looked in the water and saw—”

“MYSELF,” shouted the other girls in the Rosedale Brownie troop.

“Oh, you’re getting ahead of the story!” Veve protested. “Mary didn’t learn that she was the Brownie until a long while later.”

“We all know what happened,” said Jane impatiently. “The children started doing the work at home, making the old couple think they were the brownies. Then one day they were discovered.”

“Even so, they kept on helping,” Connie contributed. “And everyone said the children were a blessing, not a burden.”

“That’s a bob-tailed version of Mrs. Julianna Horatia Ewing’s lovely story,” Miss Gordon laughed. “More than anything else, it embodies the ideals of our organization.”

“I wish there were real brownies today,” Veve said wistfully.

“Ones that would do useful things such as washing the breakfast dishes!”

“And making the beds!” added Eileen. At home that particular task fell to her.

“If I had a brownie all my own, I’d want him to plan special surprises for me,” declared Veve dreamily. “I wouldn’t wear him out doing grubby household tasks.”

“What would you ask your brownie to do?” Connie asked.

“Oh—wonderful magic things!”

“For instance?” probed Connie.

“Well—oh, I know! I’d have him build me a tree house!”

“A tree house!” exclaimed Eileen, intrigued by the thought.

“I’d have the brownie build it right here in this oak tree,” Veve went on grandly. “It would be a wonderful little house! With windows and doors and a roof! I’d have curtains and a table and chairs!”

“How would you get up to your tree house?” scoffed Jane. “Fly like the birds?”

“Oh, my brownie would build a stairway around the tree trunk. He’d take care of everything!”

“You need a carpenter, not a brownie!” laughed Connie. “Some boys in our neighborhood once built a tree house. It wasn’t very sturdy though and fell down when a strong wind came along.”

“A tree house would be grand,” declared Sunny. “Oh, wouldn’t it be heavenly if the Brownies—us, I mean—had a place of our very own up in that oak?”

“Let’s all wish hard for it!” proposed Veve, fired by her own imagination. “Maybe—who knows—it might come true!”

“Are you crazy?” demanded Jane scornfully. “You know very well wishes hardly ever come true.”

“Well, they could!” Veve insisted.

“Let’s all wish,” urged Sunny. “What’s the difference? Even if it doesn’t come true, it won’t do any harm.”

“It’s silly,” Jane argued.

Sunny and Veve refused to be turned aside. To humor them, the other girls said they would join in making the wish.

Jane, however, would have no part in the pretense.

“We have to do this right or it won’t work,” Veve instructed the Brownies. “Everyone close her eyes.”

“Not I!” announced Jane.

“Now everyone wish very hard for a beautiful little house right above our heads in this oak,” went on Veve, ignoring Jane. “Wish hard, hard, HARD.”

Jane snickered.

“Where’s your tree house?” she teased. “I don’t hear any hammering.”

“The charm didn’t work because you wouldn’t wish,” Veve retorted crossly.

“It didn’t work because there aren’t any brownies,” corrected Jane. “Of all the silly ideas—”

A stone clattered down the hillside, rolling and bouncing until it came to rest almost at the base of the oak tree.

“What was that?” Jane interrupted herself, startled by the sound.

Veve was staring at the stone, unable to believe her own eyesight.

“Look!” she finally managed to say.

Attached to the stone—in fact, wrapped entirely around it—was a paper. A rubber band held it tightly in place.

“Well, what do you know?” Jane mumbled.

By this time Veve had recovered from the first shocked surprise.

Darting forward, she seized the stone.

“It’s a message for us!” she shouted. “Who says now that there aren’t any brownies?”