Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness.  We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines.  With never a plash we slid.  Rare drops fell from the cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable passage.  Sometimes from far within the forest would come sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs.  Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread.  Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman!  Take up no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too loudly.  Somewhat comes.  Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the shadows by the shore.

Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it and it came not.  To glide over glassiness while uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous.  Night and stillness laid their soothing spell upon me.  I was entranced.  I lost myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.

Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.

There he was!  There was the moose trampling and snorting hard-by, in the shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars, making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence in tumult.

I trembled with sudden eagerness.  I seized my gun.  In another instant I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my shoulder,—­

“I kinder guess yer ‘ve ben asleep an’ dreamin’, ha’n’t yer?”

So I had.

Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars.  Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and veins of water and sunlight.  Till long past midnight we paddled and watched and listened, whisperless.  In vain.  At last, as we rounded a point, the level gleam of our dying camp-fire athwart the water reminded us of passing hours and traveller duties, of rest to-night and toil to-morrow.

My companions, fearless as if there were no bears this side of Ursa Major, were bivouacked in one of the barns.  There I entered skulkingly, as a gameless hunter may, and hid my untrophied head beneath a mound of ancient hay, not without the mustiness of its age.

No one clawed us, no one chawed us, that night.  A Ripogenus chill awaked the whole party with early dawn.  We sprang from our nests, shook the hay-seed out of our hair, and were full-dressed without more ceremony, ready for whatever grand sensation Nature might purvey for our aesthetic breakfast.

Nothing is ever as we expect.  When we stepped into out-of-doors, looking for Ripogenus, a lake of Maine, we found not a single aquatic fact in the landscape.  Ripogenus, a lake, had mizzled, (as the Americans say,) literally mizzled.  Our simplified view comprised a grassy hill with barns, and a stern positive pyramid, surely Katahdin; aloft, beyond, above, below, thither, hither, and yon, Fog, not fog, but FOG.