r you, Master Fred;" and
we roused up and found ourselves gliding under the lee of an island
covered with trees.

"Oh, _do_ stop here!" we both cried.

"Well, I don't mind," said Mr. Rowe, removing his hat, and mopping
himself with his very useful pocket-handkerchief. "Jem, there's a bit
of grass there, let her have a mouthful."

"I thought you'd like this," he continued; "there ain't a prettier bit
between here and Pyebridge."

It was so lovely, that the same idea seized both Fred and me: Why not
settle here, at least for a time? It was an uninhabited island, only
waiting to be claimed by some adventurous navigator, and obviously
fertile. The prospect of blackberries on the mainland was particularly
fine, and how they would ripen in this blazing sun! Birds sang in the
trees above; fish leaping after flies broke the still surface of the
water with a musical splash below; and beyond a doubt there must be
the largest and the sweetest of earth-nuts on the island, easy to get
out of the deep beds of untouched leaf-mould. And when Mr. Rowe cried
"Look!" and we saw a water-fowl scud across the lake, leaving a sharp
trail like a line of light behind her, we felt that we might spend all
our savings in getting to the Pacific Ocean, and not find when we got
there a place which offered more natural resources to the desert
islander.

If the barge-master would have gone ashore on the mainland out of the
way, and if we could have got ashore on the island without help, we
should not have confided our plans to so doubtful a friend. As it was,
we were obliged to tell Mr. Rowe that we proposed to found a
settlement in Linnet Lake, and he was completely opposed to the idea.

It was only when he said (with that air of reserved and funded
knowledge which gave such unfathomable depth to his irony, and made
his sayings so oracular)--"There's very different places in the world
to Linnet Flash"--that we began to be ashamed of our hasty enthusiasm,
and to think that it would be a pity to stop so short in our
adventurous career.

So we decided to go on; but the masterly way in which Mr. Rowe spoke
of the world made me think he must have seen a good deal of it, and
when we had looked our last upon the island, and had crept with
lowered mast under an old brick bridge where young ferns hung down
from the archway, and when we were once more travelling between flat
banks and coppices that gave us no shelter, I said to the
barge-master--"Have