"Something in this style?" suggested Herring. He had secretly removed one of his own shoes, and handling it with a kind of comic reverence, as if the soggy, muddy thing was a precious work of art, he presented it to her attention. And then Phyllis smiled without even trying and then laughed. "I said a _shoe_," she said, "not a travelling bath-tub." But he slipped that great shoe over her little foot, and so bound it to her ankle with his handkerchief and necktie that it promised to stay on. "But you?" she said. "Luck is with me to-day," said Herring. "Anybody can walk through an impassable swamp, but few are given the opportunity to hop. General Sherman should have thought of that. It would have showed the Confederates just what he thought of them if instead of marching through Georgia he had hopped." And he pursued this new train of thought for some time. He improvised words to old tunes, and sang them at the top of his lungs: "As we were hopping through Georgia." And last and worst he sang: "There'll be a hop time in the old town to-night." And when he had occasion to address Phyllis directly, he no longer called her Miss Darling, but "Goody Two Shoes." He said that his own name was not Mr. Herring but Mr. Hopper, and that he was a famous cotillon leader. But even he became a little quiet when the light began to fail, and a little serious. "Whatever happens," he said, "it will be a great comfort to you to realize that it's entirely my fault. On the other hand, if we had gotten back into that boat, we might have been drowned long before this." A little later Phyllis said: "I'm about all in. It's too dark to see. I----" "Couldn't have chosen a better camping site myself," said Herring humbly. "First thing to think of is the water-supply--and fuel. Now, here the fuel grows right out of the water----" "We haven't any matches." "Yes, we have; but they are wet and won't light." "We'll die of cold before morning," said Phyllis; "there's no use pretending we won't." "On the contrary. Now is the time to pretend all sorts of things. Did you ever try to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together?" "Never." "Well, try it. It will make you warmer than the fire would. Afterward we will play 'Paddy cake, Paddy cake,' and 'Bean Porridge hot.'" "Do men in danger always carry on the way you do?" asked Phyllis. "Always," he answered. "I can understand trying to be funny during a cavalry charge, or while falling off a cliff," said Phyllis, "but not while slowly and miserably congealing." "You are not a Bostonian," said Herring. "Half the inhabitants of that municipality freeze to death and the others burn." "I've stayed in Boston," said Phyllis, "and the only difference that I could see between it and other places was that the people were more agreeable and things were done in better taste. And what gardens!" "Ever seen the Arboretum?" "Have I?" "In lilac time?" "Mm!"