ds a future beautified with as many
shades of blue as the mountain ramparts beyond the river flowing by
her door. There was no hitch to speak of. Grandma, being one of a
bygone brigade, enforced the almost obsolete rule of a chaperon, and
the two evils in this case being represented by Andrew and me, Dawn
considered me the lesser, and installed me in the office known by the
irreverent as "gooseberrying."

Mostly it is a thankless and objectionable undertaking, but in this
instance it was delightful, and we three spent a kind of antenuptial
honeymoon that was an experience to be appreciated with a warm glow by
one whom the world has all gone by.

I suddenly developed a latent artistic ambition, and no subject would
do for my brush but the exquisite scenes far up the quiet river, where
its deep clear pools lay like basins under the overhanging cliffs,
and numerous species of beautiful flowering creepers clambered over
the cool brown rocks shaded by the turpentine and gum-trees, ti-tree,
wild cotton-bush, native hibiscus, and an endless variety of trees and
shrubs getting a foothold in the crevices. These nooks, owing to the
rugged and precipitous country, could only be reached by water, so
Ernest rowed me up by boat and Dawn went with me for company, for thus
do we live the best of our lives under pretence of trivial outside
actions. The river was dotted with other boaters on these summer
afternoons, and Grandma Clay's "Best Boats on the River" were seldom
idle, while Uncle Jake was also occupied in collecting the tariff from
those who hired them, and in seeing that the boats themselves were
safely moored again after their jaunts.

I fear that I may have been a better chaperon from Dawn's point of
view than from grandma's, but even chaperons, however great their
diplomacy, cannot well serve two mistresses. While I sketched, the
young couple made horticultural expeditions up the river-banks where
the cliffs were not too precipitous, and though they went beyond my
sight and hearing, and after a couple of hours' absence returned with
no better specimens of ferns and flowers than were to be plucked
within a stone's-throw of the boat, I failed to remark it. They were
equally lenient in the matter of my feeble sketches, which never
progressed beyond a certain stage, and which could have been equally
well perpetrated at home from memory, for all the justice they did the
exquisite little gems of the picturesque river scenery.