The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation by Annie Fellows Johnston

WARWICK HALL looked more like an old English castle than a modern / boarding-school for girls. Gazing at its high towers and massive portal, / one almost expected to see some velvet-clad page or lady-in-waiting come / down the many flights of marble steps leading between stately terraces / to the river. Even a knight with a gerfalcon on his wrist would not have / seemed out of place, and if a slow-going barge had trailed by between / the willow-fringed banks of the Potomac, it would have seemed more in / keeping with the scene than the steamboats puffing past to Mount Vernon, / with crowds of excursionists on deck.

The gorgeous peacocks strutting along the terraces in the sun were / partly responsible for this impression of mediaeval grandeur. It was for / that very purpose that Madam Chartley, the head of the school, kept the / peacocks. That was one reason, also, that she proudly retained the coat / of arms in the great stained glass window over the stairs, when / circumstances obliged her to turn her ancestral home into a / boarding-school. She thought a sense of mediaeval grandeur was good for / girls, especially young American girls, who are apt to be brought up / without proper respect for age, either of individuals or institutions.

In the dining-room, two long lines of portraits looked down from / opposite walls. One was headed by a grim old earl, and the other by an / equally grim old Pilgrim father of _Mayflower_ fame. The two lines / joined over the fireplace in the portraits of Madam Chartley's / great-grandparents. It was for this great-grandmother, a daughter of the / Pilgrims and a beautiful Washington belle, that Warwick Hall had been / built; for she refused to give up her native land entirely, even for the / son of an earl.

At his death, when the title and the English estates were inherited by a / distant cousin, the only male heir, this place on the Potomac was all / that was left to her and her daughter. It had been closed for two / generations. Now it had come down at last to Madam Chartley. Although / it found her too poor to keep up such an establishment, it also found / her too proud to let her heritage go to strangers, and practical enough / to find some way by which she might retain it comfortably. That way was / to turn it into a first-class boarding-school. She was a graduate of one / of the best American colleges. The patrician standards inherited from / her old world ancestors, combined with the energy and common sense of / the new, made her an ideal woman to undertake the education of young / girls, and Warwick Hall was an ideal place in which to carry out her / wise theories.

The Potomac was red with the glow of the sunset one September evening, / when four girls, on their way back to Washington after a day's / sightseeing, hurried to the upper deck of the steamboat. Some one had / called out that Warwick Hall was in sight. In their haste to reach the / railing, they scarcely noticed a tall girl in blue, already standing / there, who obligingly moved along to make room for them.

She scrutinized them closely, however, for she had seen them in the / cabin a little while before, and their conversation had been so amusing / that she longed to make their acquaintance. Her face brightened / expectantly at their approach, and, as they leaned over the railing, she / studied them with growing interest. The oldest one was near her own age, / she decided after a careful survey, about seventeen; and they were all / particular about the little things that count so much with fastidious / schoolgirls. She approved of each one of them from their broad silk / shoe-laces to the pink tips of their carefully manicured finger-nails.

As the boat swung around a bend in the river, bringing the castle-like / building into full view, a chorus of delighted exclamations broke out / all along the deck. The four girls hung over the railing with eager / faces.

"Look, Lloyd, look!" cried one of them, excitedly. "Peacocks on the / terraces! It's the finishing touch to the picture. We'll feel like Lady / Clare walking down those marble steps. There surely must be a milk-white / doe somewhere in the background."

"Oh, Betty, Betty!" was the laughing answer. "You'll do nothing now but / quote Tennyson and write poetry from mawning till night."

"They're from Kentucky," thought the girl in blue. "I'm sure of it from / the way they talk."

As the boat glided slowly along, Lloyd threw her arm around the girl / beside her, with an impulsive squeeze.

"Kitty Walton," she exclaimed, "aren't you _glad_ that the old / Lloydsboro Seminary burned down? If it hadn't, we wouldn't be on ouah / way now to that heavenly-looking boahding-school!"

The sudden hug loosened Kitty's hat, held insecurely by one pin, and in / another instant the strong breeze would have carried it over into the / river had not the girl in blue caught it as it swept past her. She / handed it back with a friendly smile, glad of an opportunity to speak.

"You are new pupils for Warwick Hall, aren't you?" she asked, when Kitty / had laughingly thanked her. "I hope so, for I'm one of the old girls. / This will be my third year."

"How perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Kitty. "We've been fairly crazy to / meet some one from there. Do tell us if it is as fine as it looks, and / as the catalogue says."

"It is the very nicest place in the world," was the enthusiastic reply. / "There are hardly any rules, and none of them are the kind that rub you / up the wrong way. We don't have to wear uniforms, and we're not marched / out to walk in wholesale lots like prisoners in a chain-gang."