So the fever-lust of travel broke. We turned to the right behind the
last island, searched out the reed-grown opening to the stream, and
paddled serenely and philosophically against the current. Deuce sat up
and yawned with a mighty satisfaction.

We had been bending our heads to the demon of wind; our ears had been
filled with his shoutings, our eyes blinded with tears, our breath
caught away from us, our muscles strung to the fiercest endeavour.
Suddenly we found ourselves between the ranks of tall forest trees,
bathed in a warm sunlight, gliding like a feather from one grassy bend
to another of the laziest little stream that ever hesitated as to which
way the grasses of its bed should float. As for the wind, it was lost
somewhere away up high, where we could hear it muttering to itself
about something.

The woods leaned over the fringe of bushes cool and green and silent.
Occasionally through tiny openings we caught instant impressions of
straight column trunks and transparent shadows. Miniature grass marshes
jutted out from the bends of the little river. We idled along as with a
homely rustic companion through the aloofness of patrician multitudes.

Every bend offered us charming surprises. Sometimes a muskrat swam
hastily in a pointed furrow of ripple; vanishing wings, barely sensed
in the flash, left us staring; stealthy withdrawals of creatures, whose
presence we realized only in the fact of those withdrawals, snared our
eager interest; porcupines rattled and rustled importantly and regally
from the water's edge to the woods; herons, ravens, an occasional duck,
croaked away at our approach; thrice we surprised eagles, once a
tassel-eared Canada lynx. Or, if all else lacked, we still experienced
the little thrill of pleased novelty over the disclosure of a group of