"Those little creeks look like runaways," thought Leon as he paused upon the uplands and beamed down upon the wide panorama of golden marsh-land and winding water. "They're for all the world like schoolboys that have cut school, giggling an' running to hide!" His eye dreamily followed the course of many a truant creek that half-turned its head, looking under the tickling sunbeams as if it were glancing back over its shoulder, while it burrowed into the marshes vainly trying to hide where the relentless schoolmaster, called, for want of a better name, Solar Attraction, might not find it and compel its return to the ocean. "And the Sugarloaf Sand-Dunes; don't they look fine?" reflected the boy scout further, his eye traveling off downstream to where the curving tidal channel broadened into pearly plains of water, bounded at one distant point, near the juncture of river and sea, by a dazzlingly white beach. There the fine colorless sand, which when viewed closely had very much the hue of skim milk, the white being shot with a faint gray-blue tinge, had been piled by the winds of ages into tall sand-hills, into pyramids and columns: one dazzling pillar, in especial, being named the Sugarloaf from its crystalline whiteness, had given its name to the whole expanse of dune and beach. The tall Sugarloaf gleamed in the distance now like a snowy lighthouse whose lamps are sleeping, presiding over the mouth of the tidal river; its brother sand-hills capped by vegetation might have been the pure bright cliffs of some fairy shore. The boy scout stood for many minutes upon the uplands, gazing afar, his mouth open as if he were physically drinking in that distant beauty. "Gee whiz! this is gr-reat; isn't it, Blinkie?" he murmured to the squatting dog by his side. "I never before saw that old Sugarloaf look as it does to-day; did you, Mr. Dog?" It had appeared just as radiantly beautiful, off and on, during all the seasons of Leon's life. But his powers of observation had not been trained as was the case of late. In the years prior to his becoming a scout, when his inseparable companion on uplands and marsh had been a shotgun--from the time he was permitted free use of one--and the all-absorbing idea in his mind how to contrive a successful shot at shore bird or animal, he had gone about "lak wit' eye shut," so far as many things just now beginning to fill him with a wonderful, speechless gladness were concerned. "Well, we're not heading for that farmhouse, are we, pup?" he said at length, turning from the contemplation of runaway creeks and radiant dunes to the completion of his father's errand.