CHAPTER II.

THE HONORARY MEMBER.

THE Miss Isabel for whom a fifth box in the post-office would be necessary lived in a charming old house, which had been built when Washington was a little boy. It had a large, old-time garden, deliciously fragrant of box, syringas, and spicy border pinks, which the children thought the utmost perfection of all that a garden should be, and wherein it was their delight to wander. Miss Isabel was the youngest and only surviving member of a merry band of brothers and sisters, and she seemed too small to live alone in the great house, with its big, empty rooms filled with the saddest and only real ghosts--the memory of those who had occupied them, the echo of feet which had ceased to walk the earth, and voices silenced by the green grass pressing on the lips that death had sealed; and had she been other than Miss Isabel she would have been melancholy; but being Miss Isabel she was as sunny as the day was long. Her gentle life was too full of care for others' sorrows to find time to think of her own, and she was too loving a little soul to ever lack love. The children worshipped her; she was their playmate, counsellor, and ideal. They had the vaguest ideas as to her age, supposing that she must be pretty old, in spite of the fact of her playing with them almost like one of themselves, for they could not remember her other than she was then; but one does not have to live long in order to be always grown up in the memory of little persons of eleven years and less, and in truth Miss Isabel was still young.

The children understood that at some time in her life Miss Isabel had not expected to live alone in the big homestead, but had looked forward to a newer home of her own, and that at the last moment something had happened to prevent her marriage.

Their elders said Miss Isabel had had "a disappointment," and the children, especially Margery, looked at her with pitying wonder, speculating on how it felt to have such a disappointment that it was spoken of as if written with a big D, and feeling, judging from their own sensations when something failed to which they were looking forward, that it must be very dreadful.

It cleared off warm and beautiful after the rain, and in the afternoon the flowers and grass looked a week farther advanced than before the storm, and the discouraged robin darted at the worms in the soft earth with jubilant chirps, and retired to the elm to sing and swing in ecstasy. As soon as school was over the children started for Miss Isabel's. She met them on the broad door-stone, looking, in her soft pink muslin, like an apple-blossom that had drifted there.

"Oh, how pretty you are!" cried Trix, giving her an enthusiastic and damaging hug, to Margery's mute amazement. It was a perpetual wonder to her how the others could fondle Miss Isabel so recklessly. If Margery threw her arms around her or kissed her, it was when she had her all to herself, and though she laid deep schemes to walk near her, and sit where she could see her, and often stroked her gown softly on the sly, she never flew to her as Trix and Amy did. She was sometimes afraid that Miss Isabel would think that the others loved her more than she, but she need not have feared; Miss Isabel understood Margery.

"We've come to tell you the nicest thing." "We've made you an honorary member." "Margery's thought of something fine." "We're going to have a club," began all four at once.

"Dear me!" cried Miss Isabel, laughing; "I shall never be able to listen to four at one time. Even a quadruped couldn't do that, you know, because he has four legs, but not four ears."

"Jack, you tell," said Trix generously, feeling it proper to resign the glory to the man of the party.

"Well, you know, Miss Isabel," Jack said willingly, "it's Margery's scheme, and we thought it so good we're going to call it the Happy Thought Club. We're going to have a post-office in Uncle Gresham's orchard."

"With five boxes, one for you," put in Amy, who had been hopping about wildly, first on one foot and then on the other, longing to speak.

"Yes, and we're each going to take a name and write letters to one another, and have a badge, and--and--oh, everything," concluded Jack, waving his hands, as if to include the universe.

"And you're to be in it, you're to be in it!" cried Trix and Amy, hugging Miss Isabel at the same time.

"Of course she's in it; it wouldn't be much if she weren't," said Jack.

"What do you think of it; you haven't said a word?" asked Margery anxiously.

"But that was owing to circumstances over which I have no control," laughed Miss Isabel. "Here are you chattering like four of the blackbirds baked in the pie, with the other twenty flown away, and how could I say anything? I think it is a splendumphant plan, and that is a portmanteau word, such as Humpty Dumpty taught Alice in Looking-Glass Land, and it means splendid and triumphant. I am deeply sensible of the honor you do me, ladies and gentleman, in inviting me to join the club, and I accept with joy and gratitude." And Miss Isabel took her pink skirts in each hand, and dropped them a real dancing-school courtesy.

"Might one ask what names you have chosen?" she said.

"We were going to be people in history," said Margery. "I was going to be Mary Queen of Scots, and Trix wanted to be Anthony Wayne, or Lafayette, or Napoleon, or something else."

"Light Horse Harry," said Trix.

"Yes; but Amy thought it would be a bother to keep up historical ways of talking--I mean old-fashioned ways--so we decided to take a name, and not a character; so now Jack is Sir Harry Hotspur, and Trix is Catharine Seyton, and I am the Lady Griselda of the Castle of the Lonely Lake, and Amy is Mrs. Peace Plenty, a philanthropist."

"Well done, Amy!" cried Miss Isabel, laughing heartily. "All but yours are just the names that I might have guessed they would have taken, and yet yours is, perhaps, the most suitable of all."

"What will you take, Miss Isabel?" asked Jack.

"Why, I can't answer such an important question without thought," said Miss Isabel. "Can you suggest a name?"

"I never could think of a name nice enough for you," said Amy lovingly.

"I think it ought to be something like Good Fairy," said Trix, "only that sounds silly."

The color had been mounting to Margery's dark hair, and Jack said:

"Margery's thought of something. Let's have it, Peggy."

"I was thinking of Miss Isabel's name after I went to bed last night," the little girl said slowly. "I knew what it ought to mean, but you couldn't make it sound like a name in English, so I asked papa this morning if you could have any words for it in any other language that would sound like a name, and he told me some. And I think," she said, very low, "if Miss Isabel will, it would be nice for her to be Lady Alma Cara."

Miss Isabel gave Margery such a look that her eyes filled with happy tears.

"I would never have dared take such a lovely name," Miss Isabel said, "but if my dear little Margery will give me it, I shall be proud to have it."

"What does it mean?" asked Trix.

"I think Dearest Darling is about what it would be in English," said Miss Isabel.

"That's you." "That's just the name." "Indeed, you are our dearest darling," said Jack and Trix and Amy. But Margery said nothing, feeling all warm and cosey inside, for she had named Miss Isabel, and her loving look had thanked her better than words.

"Now, how about a postmark?" asked Miss Isabel.

"We never thought of that," said the children.

"Well, it seems to me that since we have all taken names, it would be nice to play that our post-office was in some town with a pretty title, and not postmark our letters with the real name of the town like ordinary letters," said Miss Isabel.

"But how can we postmark at all?" asked Jack.

"If you don't mind, I will have a stamp made," said Miss Isabel, "and the postmaster or postmistress can have an ink pad, and stamp each envelope, like the real office."

"Oh, isn't that fine," "Oh, you blessed, little Miss Isabel!" "Didn't I say she ought to be called the good fairy?" "You always think of _such_ things," chorused her visitors.

"Then that's settled," continued Miss Isabel. "Now, what shall we call our town? If this is the Happy Thought Club, wouldn't it be a good idea to call the place also something that meant happiness?"

"Joyberg," remarked Margery thoughtfully.

"That wouldn't do; sounds like June bug," said Jack decidedly.

"Happiness Centre," suggested Amy.

"That is good, but a trifle long, Amy," said Miss Isabel.

"How would Bliss-sylvania do?" asked Jack. "It's like Pennsylvania, you know, and would mean _bliss_ and _woods_, and that would be saying that we had fun in the tree in the orchard."

"I don't know," began Miss Isabel doubtfully, but was overwhelmed by a chorus of applause from the three little girls, whom the name struck favorably.

"But how could we get on with so many s's in the middle?" asked Amy; "there are three right together."

"We could easily drop one, if that is the only drawback," said Miss Isabel, "and write it B-l-i-s-s-y-l-v-a-n-i-a. That is often done in spelling, and is called elision of a letter."

"It is lovely," cried all the little girls. "Jack, how did you come to think of it?"

Jack tried to look modest.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "It just popped into my head."

"Like all great thoughts," added Miss Isabel. "We will make you mayor of Blissylvania, Jack. How about postage-stamps, girls and boy?"

"Oh, must we have stamps?" they asked.

"Why, certainly not, if you would rather not; but I thought it would be more fun," said Miss Isabel. "I could paint some--say, a dozen for each of us, and then they need not be cancelled, except with a pencil-mark that would easily rub off, so they would last a long time."

"It would be much nicer, but you ought not to bother, Miss Isabel," said Amy.

"It is no trouble; I'll do them in the evening, and if Jack makes the box, and you all do lots of things, I ought to do something. An honorary member must be an honorable member," said Miss Isabel, smiling. "May I ask you to go into the arbor in the garden while I ask Mary to make some lemonade and bring it to us with cake, that we may eat and drink to the health of the Happy Thought Club of Blissylvania?"

The children passed through the great hall, and out the door opposite the front one, which admitted them to the beloved garden. On the way they decided for the nine hundred and ninety-ninth time, at least, that their Miss Isabel was the _dearest thing_, and that there was no one on earth quite like her.

This decision had hardly been arrived at when she rejoined them.

"When shall we begin?" she asked, bending her head under the wistaria vine drooping above the entrance to the arbor.

"I'm going to make the box to-night, and we thought we'd get the thing up and everything ready to-morrow," answered Jack.

"Yes, and begin Monday," added Margery. "You see this is Friday, and we shall have all day Saturday to get ready, and Sunday is a nice day to write letters, for we all go to children's Mass at nine, you know, and can write all day."

"Stopping to eat, I hope," laughed Miss Isabel.

"We are going to give you box number one, because--oh, because you are _you_, and an honorary member," said Jack. "And Margery's to have two, because she thought of the plan----"

"And you'll have to have three, because you named the town, Jack," interrupted Margery.

"And Trix and Amy will have four and five," resumed Jack.

But Miss Isabel, foreseeing possible danger, interposed.

"I wouldn't have any rewards of that kind," she said. "I'd have Blissylvania a real republic, with every one equal, and draw lots for numbers."

"So would I," echoed Margery heartily. "I don't want to be first because I thought of the plan."

"I'd like to do something to celebrate the club," cried Trix, balancing on one foot on the seat of the arbor. "I'd like to do something queer."

As she spoke the board, which was loose at one end, flew up and sent Trix flying first upward, and then into a collapsed heap under the seat.

"You've done it!" shouted Jack, in ecstasy--"you've done the queer thing!"

"O Trix, are you hurt?" cried the other two girls anxiously.

Trix's eyes were on a level with her knees, for she had fallen through, doubled up like a jack-knife.

"I fell down," she remarked, vainly trying to extricate herself.

"I thought I heard something drop!" cried Jack, rolling over in spasms of laughter, while Miss Isabel, laughing, too, at Beatrice's funny appearance and remark, helped get her up.

"I think we'd better go home," said Amy. "When Trix gets crazy there's no telling what will happen."

"It has happened," remarked Jack, looking down whence Trix had emerged. "O jolly me!"--Jack's favorite and appropriate exclamation--"O jolly me, Trix, you killed a mud worm. I knew you didn't like them, but you needn't have sat on him so hard."

"O Jack, I didn't! O Jack, where?" cried Trix, running to look. "Oh, yes, I did! Oh, please look and see if there's any of him on me!" she cried, spinning round and round wildly, in a vain effort to see the back of her own dress. "Oh, the dreadful thing!"

"See here, Trix," said Jack, "I thought you wanted to be a boy. No boy would make a row about such a little thing as sitting on a mud worm."

Trix disdained to answer.

"We ought to go, it's getting late," she said instead. "Good-night, Miss Isabel."

"Good-night, dears; good-night all of you," said Miss Isabel, kissing each happy face twice over, except Jack's, who stood for the dignity of his sex, and was not kissed, even by Miss Isabel--that is, unless no one were looking. "You shall have the post-mark and ink-pad to-morrow afternoon, and I am very grateful to you for letting me join you."

"Grateful! Pooh!" cried Jack, voicing the sentiments of them all. "We couldn't get on without you."