Then up through leafy paths to the house, with only the murmur of water audible, but that from every side; with here a gleam and there a gleam between the trees, and everything else silence and shady darkness and mystery, and one's very soul feeling half numbed with the wonder of being in such a place and at such a time. As for the house, it is the ideal of what a fishing lodge should be, with its racks for rods outside and in; its glorious roomy balcony dining-room, its large central sitting-room and its half-dozen or more of most excellent bedrooms, each commanding a more fascinating view over trees and river than its next neighbour, and each with the perpetual sing-song of the gentle mother Voksa to sing the tired angler to sleep with her eternal lullaby. And now, as C. G. most appropriately observes, a little supper. The night and the place and the circumstances are about as full of poetry as such things can be; my very soul seems steeped in mysticism, and the witchery of the surroundings has made a poet of me to my very backbone; but--well, they did not give us time to eat at Wiborg, nor at St. Andrea, nor anywhere else, and the very word "supper" is sufficient to send poetry to the winds and to convert the poet into the ravening wolf until the leeway of the appetite has been made up. Luckily there is plenty to eat and it is ready to hand. Julia, the Finn cook, a neat, clean-looking person who cannot speak or understand a single word of Russian or anything else but Finnish--Julia has baked some quite delicious bread; and there is Finnish butter--none of your "Dosset" this!--and C. G.'s baskets contain town-bought dainties of the very best: it is pleasant to sit and enjoy such a supper with the white gleam of the midnight Voksa visible to us wherever we choose to peep for it between the ghostly trees that would screen it from us; and with the soft babble of her waters for ever in our ears, as though they were constantly telling of the wonders in trout and silver grayling that lurk and hide from us in the secret depths beneath; as though each wavelet had such a secret to tell us and were murmuring to us as it passed, "Down below--just here--oh, such a trout! oh, such a trout! Quick, or he will be off and away!" There can be no question of sleeping this night. We must fix up our rods and choose our phantom minnows, and go out in boats that are phantoms also, like those ghostly fellows, J. and E. H., there, who can be seen occasionally passing slowly across the white water in the distance, silent, mysterious, intent upon their spinning, two phantoms, in phantom boats and with phantom boatmen, fishing with phantom minnows, rightly so-called--all phantoms together! What matter if we catch anything or nothing? We must go, if it be only to steep our souls in the wonderful silence and beauty of this July night on the water, and to drink in the intoxicating delight and novelty of the whole thing.