we were very hungry, we wanted to get
really into the woods before we broke bread together.

Scanty woods they were, indeed; just a few scrub pines growing out of a
bank of clean white sand. But we spread a rubber blanket in their thin
shade, and set forth our repast of biscuits and smoked beef and olives,
and fell to eating as heartily and merrily as if it had been a banquet.
The yellow warblers and the song sparrows were flitting about us; and
two cat-birds and a yellow-throat were singing from the thicket on the
opposite shore. There were patches of snowy sand-myrtle and yellow
poverty-plant growing around our table; tiny, hardy, heath-like
creatures, delicately wrought with bloom as if for a king's palace;
irrepressible and lovely offspring of the yearning for beauty that
hides in the poorest place of earth. In a still arm of the stream, a
few yards above us, was a clump of the long, naked flower-scapes of the
golden-club, now half entered upon their silvery stage.

It was strange what pleasure these small gifts of blossom and song
brought to us. We were in the mood which Wordsworth describes in the
lines written in his pocket-copy of "The Castle of Indolence":

"There did they dwell, from earthly labour free,
As happy spirits as were ever seen;
If but a bird, to keep them company,
Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween,
As pleased as if the same had been a Maiden-queen."

But our "earthly labour" began again when we started down the stream;
for now we had fairly entered the long strip of wilderness which
curtains its winding course. On either hand the thickets came down so
close to the water that there were no banks left; just woods and water
blending; and the dark topaz current swirling and gurgling through a
clump of bushes or round the trunk of a tree, as if it did not care
what path it took so long as it got through. Alders and pussy-willows,
viburnums, clethras, chokecherries, swamp maples, red birches, and all
sorts of trees and shrubs that are water-loving, made an intricate
labyrinth for the stream to thread; and through the tangle, cat-briers,
blackberries, fox grapes, and poison ivy were interlaced.

Worst of all was the poison ivy, which seemed here to deserve its other
name of poison oak, for it was more like a tree than a vine, flinging
its knotted branches from shore to shore, and thrusting its pallid,
venomous blossoms into our faces. Walter was especially susceptib