"My kingdom for a gun!" exclaimed Halicarnassus with amateur ardor. "I am glad you have no gun," said compassionate Grande. "Why should you kill them?" "Do not be alarmed," I said, soothingly, "a distaff would be as deadly in his hands." "Do you speak by the book, Omphale?" 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."