We finished our evening meal while the sun was yet above the western hills, and sat with our pipes around a smudge, made upon the broad flat rock, which recedes with a gentle acclivity from the shore, where the Bog River enters the lake, looking out over the stirless waters.  It was a beautiful view, so calm, so still and placid, and yet so wild.  The islands seemed to stand out clear from the water, to be lifted up, as it were, from the lake, so perfectly moveless and polished was its surface.  On a grassy point to the right, and a hundred rods distant, two deer were quietly feeding, while in a little bay on the left, a brood of young ducks were sporting and skimming along the water in playful gyrations around their staid and watchful mother.  On the outstretched arm of a dead tree on the island before us, sat a bald eagle, pluming himself; and high above the lake the osprey soared, turning his piercing eye downward, watching for his prey.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Smith, as he refilled his pipe, “of what the Doctor was saying the other evening about every body having a streak of the vagabond in him, which makes him relish an occasional tramp in the old woods among the natural things; things that have not been marred by the barbarisms, so to speak, of civilization.  I’m inclined to believe his theory to be true, but I see a difficulty in its practical working.  Now, suppose, Doctor, that you and I being out here together vagabondizing, as you term it, and your streak of the vagabond being twice as large as mine, you would of course desire to play the savage twice as long as I should.  There would, in that case, be a marring of the harmonies.  I should be anxious to get back to civilization, while you, being rather in your normal element, would insist upon ‘laying around loose,’ as you say, for Mercy knows how long.”

“Gentlemen,” said the Doctor in reply, “only hear this fellow!  He’s getting homesick already.  He has no wife, not a child in the world, no business, nothing to call him home save a superannuated pointer, and an old Tom cat, and yet he would leave these glorious old woods, these beautiful lakes, these rivers, these trout and deer, and all the glad music of the wild things, to-morrow, and go back to the dust, the poisoned atmosphere, the eternal jostling and monotonous noises of the city!  Truly a vagabond and a savage is Smith.  He’s afraid that his family, his mangy old pointer and dropsical cat, will suffer in his absence.”

“I scorn to answer such an accusation,” retorted Smith, “I shall treat it with dignified contempt, as I do the Doc medicines, which I never take but always pay for, just to keep him from starving, and to make him imagine he cures me.  But speaking of cats reminds me of a certain matter which occurred not many years ago.  The Doctor here, if his testimony could be relied upon, knows that I used to be troubled with indigestion, and was sometimes a little nervous”——­