bidding and closed the doors
and windows. Those shelves of books, classics and famous, time-tried
fiction, leered at him from their racks. The gold of titles, the blues
and reds and greens of covers fairly mocked him, and he saw himself
struggling with the menace of sin; he saw an honourable career and
carefully nurtured ambition fading from view, for did not all those
master minds warn the young against evil?

But they talked over the ducks of what a pity it was that all towns
could not engage themselves in thought the way Athens used to do, and
they wondered to each other when the hurrying passion of greed and its
varying phenomena would become reconciled to a modest competence and the
simplicity which they, for example, were enjoying down the Mississippi.

When he looked up from his meat sometimes he caught her eyes looking at
him. He recognized her superiority of experience and position; she made
him feel like a boy, but a boy of whom she was really quite fond, or at
least in whom she was interested. For that feeling he was grateful,
though there was something in her smile which led him to doubt his own
success in veiling or hiding the doubts or qualms which had, unbidden,
risen in his thoughts at the equivocal nature of their position.

Having dined on the best meal he had had since leaving home, they talked
a little while over the remains of the sumptuous repast. But their mood
grew silent, and they kept up the conversation with difficulty.

"I think I'd better put up my canvas top," he blurted out, and she
assented.

"And then you must come back and help me wash this awful pile of
dishes," she added.

"Oh, of course!" he exclaimed.

"I'll help with the canvas," she said, and he dared not look at her.

By the light of his lantern they put up the canvas to protect the boat
from dew. Then they looked around at the night; stars overhead, the
strange haze from the countless grains of sand which wavered over the
bar, and the river in the dark, running by.

They looked at the river together, and they felt its majesty, its power,
its resistlessness.

"It's overwhelming," he whispered. "When you can't see it you hear it,
or you feel it!"

"And it makes everything else seem so small, so unimportant, so
perfectly negligible," she added, consciously, and then with vivacity:
"I'll not make you wipe those dishes, after all. But you must take me
for a walk up this sandbar!"

"Gladly," he laughed, "but I'll help w