"Pshaw! Who cares for weeping rocks,
though they look as if they were bursting
with grief and ready to tear their pale hair
-that queer growth clinging to them.
Humph! Only crocodile tears, anyhow,
like 'Alice in Wonderland!'" cried Ista,
the laughing Eye of the White Birch
Group, whose everyday name was Polly
Leavitt.

"It's not the tears and it's not that
horribly sad lake with the little, blind,
colorless fish in it, that I mind--it 's the
Bats!" screamed Una Grosvenor. "Oh-h!"
as the mouse-like head of the cave mammal
and its skinny wing almost brushed her face.

"Well! They're not brick-bats," came
reassuringly from one of the boys, as the
Togetherers ranged through the outer part
of that vast Tory Cave--once the hiding-place
of a political refugee, whose spirit
seemed flitting among them in the filmy
cave-fog which, dank and mournful, clung
about the margin of that strange lake of
fresh water where blind fish played.

[[161]]

p160 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p161w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p162

v?