e other does the same beneath.
For the time, as our motions seem the same, so with our motives,--my
enjoyment certainly not less, with the conveniences of humanity thrown
in.

But the sun is declining low. The club-boats are out, and from island
to island in the distance these shafts of youthful life shoot swiftly
across. There races some swift Atalanta, with no apple to fall in her
path but some soft and spotted oak-apple from an overhanging tree; there
the Phantom, with a crew white and ghostlike in the distance, glimmers
in and out behind the headlands, while yonder wherry glides lonely
across the smooth expanse. The voices of all these oarsmen are dim and
almost inaudible, being so far away; but one would scarcely wish that
distance should annihilate the ringing laughter of these joyous
girls, who come gliding, in a safe and heavy boat, they and some blue
dragon-flies together, around yonder wooded point.

Many a summer afternoon have I rowed joyously with these same maidens
beneath these steep and garlanded shores; many a time have they pulled
the heavy four-oar, with me as coxswain at the helm,--the said patient
steersman being oft-times insulted by classical allusions from rival
boats, satirically comparing him to an indolent Venus drawn by doves,
while the oarswomen in turn were likened to Minerva with her feet upon
a tortoise. Many were the disasters in the earlier days of feminine
training;--first of toilet, straw hats blowing away, hair coming down,
hair-pins strewing the floor of the boat, gloves commonly happening to
be off at the precise moment of starting, and trials of speed impaired
by somebody's oar catching in somebody's dress-pocket. Then the actual
difficulties of handling the long and heavy oars,--the first essays
at feathering, with a complicated splash of air and water, as when a
wild-duck in rising swims and flies together, and uses neither element
handsomely,--the occasional pulling of a particularly vigorous stroke
through the atmosphere alone, and at other times the compensating
disappearance of nearly the whole oar beneath the liquid surface, as if
some Uncle Kuehleborn had grasped it, while our Undine by main strength
tugged it from the beguiling wave. But with what triumphant abundance
of merriment were these preliminary disasters repaid, and how soon
outgrown! What "time" we sometimes made, when nobody happened to be near
with a watch, and how successfully we tossed oars in saluting, whe