The cloth, in snowy whiteness, is spread over the mound, and garnished with cup, saucer, plate, and dish. In an angle of the bank, faced with rock, a fire in the meanwhile has been lighted, of pine-knots and dry branches, for the manufacture of our tea and coffee. One of the party, having gone a little into the woods in search of blackberries, now returns, bearing a basket heaped up with the rich, glossy fruit, as black as Kather—somebody’s eyes—(the somebody is now making our tea and coffee at the fire yonder)—and they are as bright specimens of ebony as any I know of. The golden butter, and the silver sugar—(I like epithets—don’t you, Mr. Critic?)—are ranged in their places with the other viands, and the whole so crowd the table-cloth as fairly to hide its whiteness. We draw to, and fall to. What a clatter of knives and forks, and what a sound of cheerful voices. Care is at a discount—mirth is in the ascendant, and nature is in accordance with our mood. We are in the height of fashion, too, out here in the woods, so far as respects music, to grace our repast; not the clanging sounds of brass instruments, and the head-ache poundings of the bass-drum, but the sweet melodies of the forest. A cat-bird is spitting out a succession of short notes like a bassoon; the brown thrasher is sounding her clear piccolo flute; one of the large black woodpeckers of our forests, with a top-knot like a ruby, is beating his drum on the hollow beech yonder; a blue-jay every now and then makes an _entrée_ with his trumpet, and the little wren flourishes her clarionet in such a frenzy of music as fairly to put her out of breath. The scene itself is very bright and beautiful. Sunset has now fallen upon us. A broad beam of mellow light slants through the trees above us, making the leaves transparent, each one looking as if of carved gold, and shooting through the midst of our party so as to bathe sweetly the faces of some three or four of our girls, and then making a bridge over the long nose of Hull, it stretches across the lake to the opposite shore, where the windows of Jordan’s Inn are in a blaze with it. At the edge of the lake, and a few feet from our party, a great swarm of gnats is dancing in its light, now up, now down, speckling the air in the shape of a wheel in motion. And the lake before us—so pure, so breathless, so holy—it seems entranced in a mute sunset prayer to its Maker. It has a tongue of praise sometimes—a tongue of liquid and dashing music—but it is now holding “Quaker meeting,” and is communing with God in sacred silence. And yet, after all, not wholly silence, for these little ripples, clothed in silver, run up the sand, and then fall prostrate, with a sound like the faint patterings of a shower upon leaves.