We had only a moment's watch before a fine yearling buck came down to the opposite shore and stood looking across the river. The Senator raised his rifle and fired. The buck fell in the edge of the water. "How shall we get him?" my friend asked. "It will not be difficult," I answered as I began to undress. Nothing was difficult those days. I swam the river and towed the buck across with a beech withe in his gambrel joints. The hound joined me before I was half across with my burden and nosed the carcass and swam on ahead yelping with delight. We dressed the deer and then I had the great joy of carrying him on my back two miles across the country to the wagon. The Senator wished to send a guide for the deer, but I insisted that the carrying was my privilege. "Well, I guess your big thighs and broad shoulders can stand it," said he. "My uncle has always said that no man could be called a hunter until he can go into the woods without a guide and kill a deer and bring it out on his back. I want to be able to testify that I am at least partly qualified." "Your uncle didn't say anything about fetching the deer across a deep river without a boat, did he?" Mr. Wright asked me with a smile. Leaves of the beeches, maples and basswoods--yellowed by frost--hung like tiny lanterns, glowing with noonday light, above the dim forest-aisle which we traveled. The sun was down when we got to the clearing. "What a day it has been!" said Mr. Wright when we were seated in the wagon at last with the hound and the deer's head between his feet and mine. "One of the best in my life," I answered with a joy in my heart the like of which I have rarely known in these many years that have come to me. We rode on in silence with the calls of the swamp robin and the hermit thrush ringing in our ears as the night fell. "It's a good time to think, and there we take different roads," said my friend. "You will turn into the future and I into the past." "I've been thinking about your uncle," he said by and by. "He is one of the greatest men I have ever known. You knew of that foolish gossip about him--didn't you?" "Yes," I answered.