Ned did not seat himself again, but began to wander along the shores of the lake. There was all about it a hedge or border of the Southern plant called _Yucca gloriosa_, and its bayonet-like leaves and tall shafts with their white pendent liliaceous blossoms were reflected in the smooth water, all as motionless as if the whole were some softly vivid aquarelle. Presently a skiff, freighted with children, came gliding along with ripples about its prow and a wake of foam in which the reflections were lost for a time, the snowy blossoms only gradually sketched anew on the surface as by some trembling, tentative, unpracticed brush. The detective, now strolling along the broad drive, could ill keep his eye upon the boy as he dawdled among the tall, flowering spikes; even less when Ned abruptly came to a stand-still to gaze fixedly upon the countenance of a swan, waddling in its ungainly style up the green bank toward a small, daintily befrilled, rosy child, who with her nurse's arm protectively about her waist, was making bold to offer the bird a bit of cracker in disregard of the mandatory sign, "Don't feed the Swans." The detective found it yet more difficult to dispose of himself appropriately when, as he still incidentally followed the boy, Ned paused in further reaches of the park to gaze through a high fence, which was constructed in a pretty, rustic fashion, and which served to keep in a few deer. One of these had a fawn, and the little creature was beside its mother. The boy had not known before that these animals are dappled with white in early youth, and this indisputable presentment of the fact brought him bolt upright against the fence, where he stared in the interstices while both hands grasped the structure.