“O my God!” he would suddenly exclaim, “did you ever see such blue in your life!” and then again, evidently referring to some particularly attractive effect in the phantasmagoria of his fever, “it’s no use—­you must let me stop and have a shot to get that, before it goes.”

One place that seemed particularly to haunt him was—­Mauch Chunk.  He had been there before, and, as we had walked along, had often talked enthusiastically of it.  “Wait till we get to Mauch Chunk,” he said; “then the real fun will begin.”  And now, over and over again, he kept making pictures of Mauch Chunk, till I could have cried.

“Dramatic black rocks,” he would murmur, “water rushing from the hills in every direction—­clean-cut, vivid scenery—­like theatres—­the road runs by the side of a steel-blue river at the bottom of a chasm, and there is hardly room for it—­the houses cling to the hillside like swallows’ nests—­here and there patches of fresh green grass gleam among the rocks, and, high up in the air on some dizzy ledge, there is a wild apple-tree in blossom—­it is all black rocks and springs and moss and tumbling water—­”

Then again his soul was evidently walking in the Blue Mountains, and several times he repeated a phrase of mine that had taken his fancy:  “And now for the spacious corridors of the Highlands, and the lordly gates of the Hudson.”

Then he would suddenly half awaken and turn to me, realizing the truth, and say: 

“O our beautiful journey—­to end like this!” and fall asleep again.

And once more I fell to thinking of fairy springs by the roadside, and apples falling innocently from the bough, and how the beautiful journey we call life might some day suddenly end like this, with half the beautiful road untravelled—­the rest sleep and perchance dreams.

* * * * *

But Colin did not die.  He is once more painting out in the sun, and next year we plan to stand again on that very spot by the Susquehanna, and watch the shadows of great fishes gliding through the dreamy water, and the mud-turtle with her trail of little ones moving from rock to rock—­and then we shall strike out on the road again, just where we left off that October afternoon; but the reader need not be afraid—­we shall not write a book about it.

ENVOI

And now the merry way we took Is nothing but a printed book;

We would you had been really there,
Out with us in the open air—­

For, after all, the best of words
Are but a poor exchange for birds.

Yet if, perchance, this book of ours
Should sometimes make you think of flowers,

Orchards and barns and harvest wain,
“It was not written all in vain—­”

So authors used to make their bow,
As, Gentle Reader, we do now_.