ickers. Then they got off, and walked across the
tracks, past saloons, and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint,
and on, and on down a road that seemed endless. A stretch of cinders,
then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great length of yellow sand
and--the lake! We say, the lake! like that, with an exclamation point
after it, because it wasn't at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans
know. This vast blue glory bore no relation to the sullen, gray, turbid
thing that the city calls the lake. It was all the blues of which you've
ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a new shade. Sapphire. No,
cobalt. No, that's too cold. Mediterranean. Turquoise. And the sand in
golden contrast. Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the
dunes. Now, any dictionary or Scotchman will tell you that a dune is
a hill of loose sand. But these dunes are done in American fashion,
lavishly. Mountains of sand, as far as the eye can see, and on the top
of them, incredibly, great pine trees that clutch at their perilous,
shifting foothold with frantic root-toes. And behind that, still more
incredibly, the woods, filled with wild flowers, with strange growths
found nowhere else in the whole land, with trees, and vines, and brush,
and always the pungent scent of the pines. And there you have the
dunes--blue lake, golden sand-hills, green forest, in one.

Fanny and Clarence stood there on the sand, in silence, two ridiculously
diminutive figures in that great wilderness of beauty. I wish I could
get to you, somehow, the clear sparkle of it, the brilliance of it, and
yet the peace of it. They stood there a long while, those two, without
speaking. Then Fanny shut her eyes, and I think her lower lip trembled
just a little. And Clarence patted her hand just twice.

"I thank you," he said, "in the name of that much-abused lady known as
Nature."

Said Fanny, "I want to scramble up to the top of one of those dunes--the
high one--and just sit there."

And that is what they did. A poor enough Sunday, I suppose, in the minds
of those of you who spend yours golfing at the club, or motoring along
grease-soaked roads that lead to a shore dinner and a ukulele band. But
it turned Fanny Brandeis back a dozen years or more, so that she was
again the little girl whose heart had ached at sight of the pale rose
and, orange of the Wisconsin winter sunsets. She forgot all about
layettes, and obstetrical outfits, and flannel bands, and safety pin