218 THROUGH GLADE AND MEAD. 
sadly as Captain Hall’s Esquimos pined to return to 
the ice of their old home. ; 
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has experi- 
enced my pleasure in boating before me and has ex- 
pressed it so fittingly that I will let him speak for me: 
“Tere you are afloat with a body a rod and a half 
long, with arms or wings as you may choose to call 
them, stretching more than twenty feet from tip to tip; 
every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them 
as if your spinal cord ran down the center of your boat 
and the nerves of your arms tingled as far as the broad 
blades of your oars. This, in sober earnest, is the 
nearest approach to flying that man has ever made, or 
perhaps ever will make. I dare not publicly name the 
rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate me on 
some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are 
smooth as a sheet of beryl-green silk and I run along 
ripping it up with my knife-edged shell of a boat, the 
rent closing after me like those wounds of angels 
which Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for 
many a long rood behind me.” 
A right fair sight is the lake which I know. The 
hills which rise from its margin, the woods, the dark 
shadows along the western shore in the afternoon, the 
bright light flooding the eastern shore, the slight, laugh- 
ing ripple on the water, all combine to form as pretty a 
picture as I wish to see. How pleasant it was in those 
