paddle, lest he should shatter the thin
basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.

Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the
unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its
calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness. We crept
noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines.
With never a plash we slid. Rare drops fell from the cautious paddle
and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable
passage. Sometimes from far within the forest would come sounds of
rustling branches or crackling twigs. Somebody of life approaches with
stealthy tread. Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up no pearly
drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too
loudly. Somewhat comes. Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the
shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing
or body thwarted it and it came not. To glide over glassiness while
uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous. Night and
stillness laid their soothing spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost
myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and
purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was! There was the moose trampling and snorting hard-by, in the
shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars,
making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence
in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my gun. In another instant
I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my
shoulder,--

"I kinder guess yer 've ben asleep an' dreamin', ha'n't yer?"

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and
swallow reflections of stars. Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the
bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and veins of
water and sunlight. Till long past midnight we paddled and watched and
listened, whisperless. In vain. At last, as we rounded a point, the
level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart the water reminded us of
passing hours and traveller duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no bears this side of Ursa
Major, were bivouacked in one of the barns. There I entered skulkingly,
as a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied head beneath a mo