Potter climbed up and settled himself in his seat. "You're not going to quarrel because I don't like dancing?" he asked. "I'd forgive you 'most anything this morning. Let's start. I'm crazy to know how it feels." The engine started with a tremendous throbbing roar and the hydro-aeroplane was trundled out on its rails and down the incline to the smooth waters of Lake St. Clair. For an interval it scudded along, neither floating nor flying, like a wild duck frightened and beginning its flight; then the water dropped away, and they were mounting, mounting into the clear, cold spring air. Potter directed their flight out over the lake, presently veering to the northward and heading toward a small black blot resting distantly on the glittering expanse of water. Hildegarde's cheeks were flushed, her eyes excited, brilliant. She sat drinking in the sensation of flight, and watching with childish joy and wonder as the lake spread its beautiful panorama beneath and on all sides of them. It seemed but a moment before the distant blot became the familiar light-ship, and, looking ahead, she could see dimly the parallel lines which she knew must be the ship-canal which opened a passage for the largest freighter through the bars and shoals into that channel of the delta of the St. Clair River which has for a generation been a marvelous playground for the Lake region, a playground rising on a ribbon of spiling--a sort of hem binding the raveling edge of the great marsh. Slow as the 'plane was, compared with those miracles of speed with which the chivalry of the air hold their tournaments in the lists of the sky, it seemed to eliminate time and space. Distances which the swiftest vessel passed laboriously in an hour seemed to withdraw themselves as at a magic word of command. Abreast of the light-ship they passed an up-bound freighter. Its deck seemed a mammoth gridiron as Hildegarde looked down upon it--a gridiron whose cross-bars were battened hatches. It was traveling its fifteen miles an hour on its way to Duluth or Superior--but they left it behind. It dropped away from them almost with the swiftness of a falling stone. They flew low over the piers, and then mounted. Beneath them lay the familiar, rambling structures of the Old Club. They continued to mount, for Potter wanted to spread before her the great reaches of the delta--a world of close-growing wild rice and reeds, a universe of wild birds, myriad tiny islets, with here and there a strip of land high enough above the water to supply a foothold for wind-bent, scraggling trees. Here and there wound a maze of channels, some navigable by small boats, and to the northward another gleaming river, the North Channel, up which the fleets of the Lakes had been compelled to pass before the construction of the ship-canal.