There was no romantic smell of red roses in this June landscape; just tobacco smoke, and the faint reminiscent fragrance of fried trout, and the mournful, sizzling, pungent consciousness of a camp-fire quenched for a whole year with a tinful of wet coffee-grounds. Gliding out cautiously into the lake as though the mere splash of a paddle might shatter the whole glassy surface, the Indian guide propounded the question that was uppermost in his mind. “Cutting your trip a bit short this year, ain’t you, Boss?” he quizzed tersely. Out from his muffling Mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment. “Oh, I don’t know,” he answered with studied lightness. “There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little.” “A woman, eh?” said the Indian guide, laconically. “A _woman_?” thundered the Senior Surgeon. “A--woman? Oh, ye gods, no! It’s wall-paper.” Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing, boisterously, hilariously, like a crazy school-boy. Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him. Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him. The Senior Surgeon’s laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a purely convulsive physical impulse; but the echo’s laugh was a fantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces, where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness. Seven miles farther down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian guide spoke again. Racking the canoe between two rocks, paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian guide lifted his voice high, piercing, above the swirling roar of waters. “Eh, Boss,” he shouted, “I ain’t never heard you laugh before!” Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long, strenuous hours that were left to them. The Indian guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cowshed. I don’t know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out. It was just four days later, from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack, that the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate. Even though a man likes home no better than he likes--tea, few men would deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long, fussy railroad journey. Five o’clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a peculiarly wonderful time to be arriving home, especially if that home has a garden about it, so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously upon the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy visually with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the actual draft.