The day is beautiful, an autumn crispness in the air, an autumn glory in the streaming sunshine and richly-tinted foliage. We look wistfully at the lovely landscape as we travel onward. There is something of sadness in saying farewell to this fair land, in ending the pleasant Bohemian existence of the past two months, and turning our faces toward the ordinary life which awaits us in the world below. But we remind each other that all summer holidays must end, and that ours has been a decided success. It is true that we are all a half-dozen shades darker than when we left home, but complexions are not the only things in the world to be considered, and we have gained health and strength enough to make us regard tan and sunburn with philosophy. “How differently we should feel if we had gone to a fashionable watering-place!” says Sylvia. “What unsatisfactory sensations of the _vanitas vanitatum_ order one has at the fag end of a season of that description! One has spent a great deal of money, ruined any number of dresses, danced oneself thin, conceived a disgust for one’s fellow-creatures—and had hardly three days of real enjoyment to pay for it all!—while in Arcadia one spends little money, needs few dresses, and enjoys oneself to the top of one’s bent! Hereafter I shall throw my cap in the air and cry ‘_Vive la Nature!_’” “Yes,” asserts Charley. “No doubt you will—for a month. We shall see whether your pastoral fever lasts till next summer. I prophesy that it will have died into ashes before that time.” “Which means, I suppose, that you are already anxious to leave me behind when you take your hunting-trip to the Balsam,” she retorts. “But I mean to go! I give you warning of that.” “‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,’” he replies, with a smile. In profitable conversation like this we pass the time as we travel on, drawing nearer and nearer to the mountains, which begin to lose their blue tint and loom in dark, rugged masses before us. Presently we enter fairly among them, and Eric says, as a clear, rapid stream comes dashing in turbulent beauty across our path: “This is Reedy Patch Creek. We shall cross it more than a dozen times before we reach the Broad River, to which it is bound.” “Pray tell me,” says Aunt Markham, “what is the origin of this name? Reedy Patch—how absurd!” “It seems so,” says Eric. “I can throw no light on its origin, further than that at some remote time there must have been a patch of reeds somewhere about here.”