Straight ahead! _Down!_"

CHAPTER IX--OBLIVION

This, the morning. Then, almost before we mark the change, swift-passing
time has moved on; the lowering mist has lifted; the occasional
pattering rain-drops have ceased; the wind, in sympathy, is diminished.
And of a sudden, arousing us to a consciousness of time and place, the
sun peeps forth through a rift in the scattering clouds, and at a
point a bit south of the zenith.

"Noon!" comments Sandford, intensely surprised. Somehow, we are always
astonished that noon should follow so swiftly upon sunrise. "Well, who
would have thought it!"

That instant I am conscious, for the first time, of a certain violent
aching void making insistent demand.

"I wouldn't have done so before, but now that you mention it, I do
think it emphatically." This is a pitiful effort at a jest, but it
passes unpunished. "There comes Johnson to bring in the birds."

After dinner--and oh, what a dinner! for, having adequate time to do
it justice, we drag it on and on, until even Aunt Martha is
satisfied--we curl up in the sunshine, undimmed and gloriously warm;
we light our briers, and, too lazily, nervelessly content to even
talk, lay looking out over the blue water that melts and merges in the
distance with the bluer sky above. After a bit, our pipes burn
dead and our eyelids drop, and with a last memory of sunlight
dancing on a myriad tiny wavelets, and a blessed peace and abandon
soaking into our very souls we doze, then sleep, sleep as we never
sleep in the city; as we had fancied a short day before never to
sleep again; dreamlessly, childishly, as Mother Nature intended her
children to sleep.

Then, from without the pale of utter oblivion, a familiar voice breaks
slowly upon our consciousness: the voice of Johnson, the vigilant.

"Got your blind all built, boys, and the decoys is out--four dozen of
them," he admonishes, sympathetically. "Days are getting short, now,
so you'd better move lively, if you get your limit before dark."

CHAPTER X--UPON "WIPING THE EYE"

"To poets and epicures, perhaps, the lordly canvas-back--though brown
from the oven, I challenge the supercilious _gourmet_ to distinguish
between his favorite, and a fat American coot. But for me the
loud-voiced mallard, with his bottle-green head and audaciously
curling tail; for he will decoy."

I am quoting Sandford. Be that as it may, we are there, amid
frost-browned rushes that rustle softly in the wind: