DWIGHT-WIMAN CLUB. 



75 



begging a half holiday for the urchins, as if we were kings instead 

 Nimrods. The children were dismissed after " the word spoken in 

 season," by our vice-president, in absence of our honored head. 

 The steamer brought us our mail, our quotations and the latest news 

 from the front. We left in due time, the whole population of the 

 village, apparently, coming down to the shore to wave us bon voyage ; 

 the little school teacher, who had already won our hearts, standing 

 in the front bravely fluttering her handkerchief. Besides the club 

 and its guests we had on board the steamer Tom Salmon, our old 

 time guide, and a young lady, full of the guileless witchery of her 

 sex, whom Capt. Huckins had considerately established in the 

 wheelhouse under his paternal care. We stood at tne side of the 

 steamer with answering signals until the village was undistinguish- 

 able from the horizon, adjoining in a body to the wheel house. 



Our course lay for Point Elizabeth, in order to leave Tom 

 Salmon. It was a point we had always loved as a favorite camping 

 ground. Since we had last been there, Salmon had married one of 

 the reigning belles of Trading Lake, and with wife and child was 

 living in one of the most neatly-appointed houses, in interior decora- 

 tions and surroundings, it had ever been our lot to visit. Of course 

 all of the older members of the club found an excuse to go ashore 

 and renew the acquaintance of Auld Lang Syne. We found the 

 beautiful girl of a few years before bloomed into charming mother- 

 hood, holding in her arms the laughing crowing infant. Good 

 Capt. Huckins, in his zeal and bonhomtnie had run the steamer so 

 close into shore that re-embarking from the canoes we found we 

 were hard and fast aground and the wind astern. But by an im- 

 partial distribution of Matthews and other ballast, and a hearty 

 shove with the aid of some poles, we at last were free, and again v. ^ 

 gathered under the paternal eye of the captain. There was not 

 room for all of us to sit down in the wheel house, but the less favored 

 ones seemed willing to stand and talk to the bashful girl who had 

 attracted them there. With loving remembrance of camp scenes, 

 killing the deer over again, and now and then a song, we finally 

 made our way from the lake to the south branch of the Muskoka 

 River, famed in Club annals, and long after dark reached the wharf 

 at Baysville. Not a light to be seen until, after repeated shouts 

 from the Captain, a beacon appeared in the window of Captain 

 Huckins, house and then the glimmer of a lantern came down to the 

 shore. 



