"Only fired once or twice," said Halicarnassus, "just for fun,
and to show her how to do it."

"How not to do it, you mean," said the Anakim.

"You fired forty times," I said quietly, but firmly, "and the
ducks would come out and look at you as interested as could be.
You know you didn't scare a little meadow-hen. They knew you
couldn't hit."

"Trade off your ducks against my sheep, and call it even?"
chuckled the Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided
along, enjoying, not entranced, comfortable, but not sublime,
content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day,
happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each
other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles
of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight;
falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the
influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a
conjoint and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which
would no sooner be satisfactorily accomplished than something
would turn up and set our calculations and islands adrift, and
we would have to begin new. Dome Island we made out by its
shape, unquestionably; Whortleberry we hazarded on the strength
of its bushes; "Hen and Chicks," by a biggish island brooding
half a dozen little ones; Flea Island, from a certain
snappishness of aspect; Half-Way Island, by our distance from
dinner; Anthony's Nose, by its unlikeness to anything else,
certainly not from its resemblance to noses in general, let
alone the individual nose of Mark Antony, or Mad Anthony, or