The whim was contagious and inspiring. Together they scrambled down the snow-bank, joining hands for the steep slide. At the bottom Tony’s boat loomed gray before them, buried like a knoll. The tarpaulin, loaded with snow, clung heavy and obstinate; but Miles ripped it off at last, and slid the boat gently from the chocks. “Dragging it will sound like the mischief,” he said. “Could you manage the bow?” Luckily the boat was light, and as they staggered down the beach, winding among the black open patches and avoiding the ice, he felt, with a singular pride, that the girl held up her end gamely. He had allowed the two men a long start, and still listened, till their oars sounded feebly across the water. “Ready,” he said at last. She brushed past him into the stern. He shoved off, muffled the rowlocks in his woolen scarf and a boat-mop of frozen jute, and rowed slowly out, with only a faint creaking, and the steady trickle from the blades. Astern, as the shore retreated, the twin lights drew imperceptibly toward each other. Their glow left the water in darkness, and, dwindling, became fixed, lustrous points, as of two erring planets sunken low, on the wrong side of the horizon. Out here the river lay black under the starlight, which, no longer reflected by the snow, seemed to have raised and withdrawn aloft. Far ahead the oars were beating regular as a pulse,--a dull throbbing that alone disturbed the night, except when thin peals of untimely cock-crow sounded, faint as muted horns, from indoors, across wide distances. “Don’t they seem strange?” said the girl, half to herself. “Like something--like a ghost story.” “Yes--or the legend,” answered Miles. “And it _is_ drawing on to Christmas time.” A short silence followed, before she asked: “What legend?” “Oh--why, you know it.” He slowly recalled the lines, prompted by the pale mystery of stars overhead, the swerving profundity of the tide beneath, but more than all by the whispering, muffled figure on the thwart, obscure as a shape of sorcery. “‘Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated, This bird of dawning singeth all night long. And then--’” The dripping of the oars marked the pauses, crisply and rhythmically. “‘And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallowed and so gracious is the time.’” He rowed on steadily. “Oh, I remember where,” she said, after a time. “They read that to us in school one winter. It’s very beautiful. But I can’t remember things like you. I wish--” She laughed somewhat bitterly. “We don’t have books in our house--”