From The Silver Tarn by Katharine Adams, c.1924. An old fashioned young adult romance, part of a series about Mehitable Webster, an American girl who is living at and attending a French boarding school. The French school has been relocated to Yorkshire in England because of the disruptions of World War I, and Mehitable falls in love with the Yorkshire moors and the silver tarn (small mountain lake) that she finds on the wild moorland.

They opened their presents early in the afternoon, before dinner, and they had a merry time, in spite of the news that Robin must leave the next day. Mehitable was delighted with the blue Russian blouse which Barbara had made for her and Robin had brought with him. She cried a few tears over Aunt Comfort’s blue scarf and Desire’s petticoat, and the three girls hailed a large jar of Desire’s peach jam with shouts of joy. Robin told them how he had received it.
“Desire came to me just before we left, when I ran in to say good-by to them. She looked awfully guilty about the jam, for she heard us say we couldn’t carry much, but I hadn’t the heart to refuse her when she said, ‘Mehitable sets such store by peach jam and I don’t believe she gets enough to eat in that outlandish school, anyway.’ ”
“Desire is perfectly right. We don’t have anywhere near enough of anything that’s good. This jam will be gone almost before the jar is open. We’ll save it for a lonely night at Outliers, when fun seems a thing of the dim past.” Una was examining critically a hockey stick which her brother, Miles, had sent her, “Good of old Miles to send it. He asked Winchy to buy it for him,” she went on.
Mr. Twilltrees and his sister, Abby, came to Christmas dinner, which was rather a solemn meal. Aunt Isobel was worried about her brother’s rehumatism and seemed inclined to take a pessimistic view of everything. She shook her head at the news of Robin’s sudden departure, I’m glad we have a fine lad like you to help in this war, but it’s a dangerous part of the service, being a motor messenger,” she said to Robin. There was a moment’s silence after she spoke and then Robin remarked that Peters had promised to send him oat cakes and brandy balls, and that he hoped they would all write him every day.

The Silver Tarn is the middle book in a trilogy of books about a Vermont teen, Mehitable, who goes to Europe to attend a French boarding school and has adventures all over the continent before, during, and after World War I. All of the characters from the first book, Mehitable, return in this second book, and more are added, making for a rather crowded cast. It’s sometimes difficult to remember who is who and keep every one straight with their individual stories and personalities, especially since I haven’t read the first book in the series. Nevertheless, if you’re looking for a clean, rather nostalgic, novel set during World War I for your teen girl to read, you could do worse than Mehitable and The Silver Tarn. The third book in the series is called Toto and the Gift and centers on Mehitable’s return to France and befriending of a French orphan with dramatic ability. You can read The Silver Tarn on Internet Archive.

Content considerations: On one page of the novel a family servant, a cook, called “Black Mandy” is introduced. The cook speaks in dialect, and she goes to “Darky Town” to visit her family. This character does not reappear in the rest of The Silver Tarn.