I have said the boat has sympathy with the weather. It also has sympathy with me, or I have sympathy with it, which is the same thing. There was a time when I suffered only from rhythmic alternations of two kinds of laziness. Now exaltation is beginning to enter in as well, and I do not know the reason, unless I have caught it from the boat. Materialistic friends have told me that too much pudding will cause exaltation. I have not so much as looked upon pudding this day. An unknown poet comes swiftly past me. I hail him, and ask him for information. He tells me that he had been that way himself, and that with him it is generally caused by the scent of gardenias, or hyacinths, or narcissus. I am glad he has gone away. I think if he had stayed a moment longer I should have been a little rude. Anyway, I have got it. When one suffers from it, memory-vignettes come up quickly before the mental eye, and the mental eye has a rose-tinted glass stuck in it. O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem. That is a memory-vignette. I am back again at school in a low form, and I am asked to parse “passi,” and I parse it humorously, and there is awful silence; and then one sharp click, because the master in nervous irritation snaps in two the cedar pencil in his hand. I hate him, and he hates me. For the meaning of the words I care nothing. Now I think over them again, and I see that Virgil is very intimate with me, and that he knows the way I feel. Up comes another quotation, this time from a more modern author:-- The sun was gone now; the curled moon Was like a little feather Fluttering far down the gulf; and now She spoke through the still weather: Her voice was like the voice the stars Had when they sang together. Yes, and if he had said that the curled moon was like a bitten biscuit thrown out of window in a high wind, it would not have been much less true. But there is no poetry in a biscuit, and precious little sustenance. The gentle fall of a feather is full of poetry:-- The day is done, and the darkness Falls from the wings of night, As a feather is wafted downward From an eagle in his flight. Edgar Allan Poe quoted those lines in his lecture on The Poetic Principle, and remarked on their insouciance. Well, he’s dead. There are no more memory-vignettes. I have no more exaltation left. For a certain young woman crossed the bridge, and she had a baby with her, and a young man behind her. And she had the impertinence to call the baby’s attention to my canoe. Then she spoke winged words to the infant, and these are the exact winged words she used:-- “Chickey-chickey-chickey, boatey-boatey-boatey, o-o-m! Do you love auntey?” And she called to the young man, saying, “’Enry, cummere. ’Ere’s a boat.” Then they staggered slowly away, and took my exaltation with them. Just as I was getting a little better, the wind set in the wrong direction, and I heard her say some of it over again.