asked the Anakim, who still
carried those New Hampshire sheep on his back.

"We went a-ducking once down in Swampshire," I answered.

"Did you catch any?" queried Grande.

"Duckings? no," said Halicarnassus.

"Nor ducks either," I added. "He made great ado with his guns, and his
pouches, and his fanfaronade, and knocking me with his elbows and
telling me to keep still, when no mouse could be more still than I, and
after all he did not catch one."

"Only fired once or twice," said Halicarnassus, "just for fun, and to
show her how to do it."

"How not to do it, you mean," said the Anakim.

"You fired forty times," I said quietly, but firmly, "and the ducks
would come out and look at you as interested as could be. You know you
didn't scare a little meadow-hen. They knew you couldn't hit."

"Trade off your ducks against my sheep, and call it even?" chuckled the
Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided along, enjoying, not
entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny
sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of
being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness,
purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal
delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the
influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint
and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be
satisfactorily accomplished than something would turn up and set our
calculations and islands adrift, and we would have to begin new. Dome
Island we made out by its shape, unquestionably; Whortleberry we
hazarded on the strength of its bushes; "Hen and Chicks," by a biggish
island brooding half a dozen little ones; Flea Island, from a certain
snappishness of aspect; Half-Way Island, by our distance from dinner;
Anthony's Nose, by its unlikeness to anything else, certainly not from
its resemblance to noses in general, let alone the individual nose of
Mark Antony, or Mad Anthony, or any Anthony between. And then we
disembarked and posted ourselves on the coach-top for a six-mile ride
to Champlain; and Grande said, her face still buried in the map, "Here
on the left is 'Trout Brook' running into the lake, and a cross on it,
and 'Lt. Howe fell, 1758.' That is worth seeing."

"Yes," I said, "America loved his brother."

"America loved HIM," howled Halicarnassus, thinking to correct me and
avenge himself. Now I knew qu