e, to which it pleased him to refer his
incapacity, threw down the powerless pen, and sent him panting to his
outstretched length and another headlong career through the rosy-girdled
land.

Toward morning the madness of the fever abated somewhat, and he went
forth into the air. A lamp was still burning in his father's room, and
Richard thought, as he looked up, that he saw the ever-vigilant head on
the watch. Instantly the lamp was extinguished, the window stood cold
against the hues of dawn.

Strong pulling is an excellent medical remedy for certain classes
of fever. Richard took to it instinctively. The clear fresh water,
burnished with sunrise, sparkled against his arrowy prow; the soft deep
shadows curled smiling away from his gliding keel. Overhead solitary
morning unfolded itself, from blossom to bud, from bud to flower;
still, delicious changes of light and colour, to whose influences he
was heedless as he shot under willows and aspens, and across sheets of
river-reaches, pure mirrors to the upper glory, himself the sole tenant
of the stream. Somewhere at the founts of the world lay the land he was
rowing toward; something of its shadowed lights might be discerned here
and there. It was not a dream, now he knew. There was a secret abroad.
The woods were full of it; the waters rolled with it, and the winds. Oh,
why could not one in these days do some high knightly deed which should
draw down ladies' eyes from their heaven, as in the days of Arthur! To
such a meaning breathed the unconscious sighs of the youth, when he had
pulled through his first feverish energy.

He was off Bursley, and had lapsed a little into that musing quietude
which follows strenuous exercise, when he heard a hail and his own name
called. It was no lady, no fairy, but young Ralph Morton, an irruption
of miserable masculine prose. Heartily wishing him abed with the rest
of mankind, Richard rowed in and jumped ashore. Ralph immediately seized
his arm, saying that he desired earnestly to have a talk with him, and
dragged the Magnetic Youth from his water-dreams, up and down the wet
mown grass. That he had to say seemed to be difficult of utterance, and
Richard, though he barely listened, soon had enough of his old rival's
gladness at seeing him, and exhibited signs of impatience; whereat
Ralph, as one who branches into matter somewhat foreign to his mind, but
of great human interest and importance, put the question to him:

"I say, what wom