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For a moment there was silence. Then Miss May Delano, a handsome, wealthy city girl, said, with a challenging glance all around: “I’ll wait upon the table for my part, if somebody will get me something to serve!”

This was received with an outburst, and instantly all was chatter and confusion as they caught up the spirit of the thing.

“I’ll fill the orders as fast as you can take them,” boasted a Wall St. exquisite, who would have unbent his dignity to any degree to please the bewitching heiress.

“I’ll help anywhere–wherever I’m needed,” exclaimed another city belle.

“And I!” came in chorus. “We’ll be chambermaids,” said a party who had just donned bathing suits of blue flannel.

“All right! Get to work!” commanded the crowd. “You have on just the dress for the business.”

“Well, Mrs. Ingalls,” smilingly encouraged a plump matron, “I suppose we might do as good cooking here as we have done at home in times of emergency. Shall we try?”

“I’m agreeable,” laughed the lady. “That is, if we can manage the range.”

“Oh, leave that to me,” said her husband. “I guess I’ve handled ranges before.” Which caused more merriment, since that gentleman’s business was in the hardware line.

Fresh came another bevy of rosy faces, whose owners declared that they had been to a cooking school and knew all about it.

“Nothing like practical demonstration,” bantered the young men.

“Hurrah!” cried one Hamilton, the pet of the house. “Give me the girl who can don a white apron, roll up her sleeves, and plunge her pretty arms into the flour barrel! That’s what I’m looking for!” and he cleverly balanced a chair on his chin, amid a clamor of repartee and good-natured defiance.

“Go in, the whole ship’s crew!” fervently urged a family man. “It will be the best fun of the season.”

“All right!” promptly agreed the ladies. “We are ready. Now, hurry up and get on your porter’s apron in time for the next wagon of trunks. Pray, call us when you are about to shoulder one!” which turned the laugh on the muscular member of the group.

“I think I’d rather be parlor maid,” sweetly chimed in a little blonde beauty, with fluffy bangs.

“Suits you to a T,” was the gallant response from the younger men.

“And I’ll have to stand guard to keep you from flirting,” put in an adorer.

“Pot calling the kettle black!” was the saucy fling from a chorus of school-girls who were enjoying their first seaside vacation.

“Now, grandma,” exclaimed the parlor maid to a beautiful old lady with silver hair, “you shall have a big chair right in the middle of the dining hall, and be manager-in-chief.”

Meanwhile the landlord had been overcome.

“Ladies,” he now managed to articulate, and certainly he meant it, “I don’t know what to say; I don’t know how to thank you. But I know what I’ll do; I’ll turn away the last one of those quarrelsome blacks; root and branch they shall go. I’m tired of living in bedlam. I shall go down at once and start them; then I’ll telegraph to New York and take the first train out. Rest assured I shall be back to your relief as soon as possible.”

The proprietor had made himself heard in the confusion, and as he left the parlor hearty cheers followed him, when immediately the groups of talkers broke out again into plans and promises.

“Organize! Organize!” thundered a big man who had been jostled from his morning paper. “There can be no success without system.”

“Hear! Hear!” roared the fun-loving fellows. “Down with the crowd to the lower regions! Come on with your constitution and by-laws! Hold fast to law and order! Give us liberty, or death–pumpkin pies and lily-white hands! Hurrah! On to the kitchen!”

With mock circumspection they were forcing couples to pair off; but the level-headed matrons soon arranged matters more to the purpose. The various branches of work were assigned to willing hands that only awaited the signal for action.