arlands everywhere, as
if hers were a floral progress, and each came to do her honor.

Her neighbors kept up a flow of conversation as steady as the river's,
and Sylvia listened now. Insensibly the changeful scenes before them
recalled others, and in the friendly atmosphere that surrounded them
these reminiscences found free expression. Each of the three had been
fortunate in seeing much of foreign life; each had seen a different
phase of it, and all were young enough to be still enthusiastic,
accomplished enough to serve up their recollections with taste and
skill, and give Sylvia glimpses of the world through spectacles
sufficiently rose-colored to lend it the warmth which even Truth allows
to her sister Romance.

The wind served them till sunset, then the sail was lowered and the
rowers took to their oars. Sylvia demanded her turn, and wrestled with
one big oar while Warwick sat behind and did the work. Having blistered
her hands and given herself as fine a color as any on her brother's
palette, she professed herself satisfied, and went back to her seat to
watch the evening-red transfigure earth and sky, making the river and
its banks a more royal pageant than splendor-loving Elizabeth ever saw
along the Thames.

Anxious to reach a certain point, they rowed on into the twilight,
growing stiller and stiller as the deepening hush seemed to hint that
Nature was at her prayers. Slowly the Kelpie floated along the shadowy
way, and as the shores grew dim, the river dark with leaning hemlocks or
an overhanging cliff, Sylvia felt as if she were making the last voyage
across that fathomless stream where a pale boatman plies and many go
lamenting.

The long silence was broken first by Moor's voice, saying--

"Adam, sing."

If the influences of the hour had calmed Mark, touched Sylvia, and made
Moor long for music, they had also softened Warwick. Leaning on his oar
he lent the music of a mellow voice to the words of a German Volkslied,
and launched a fleet of echoes such as any tuneful vintager might have
sent floating down the Rhine. Sylvia was no weeper, but as she listened,
all the day's happiness which had been pent up in her heart found vent
in sudden tears, that streamed down noiseless and refreshing as a warm
south rain. Why they came she could not tell, for neither song nor
singer possessed the power to win so rare a tribute, and at another
time, she would have restrained all visible expression of this
indefinab