a red and risen sun; they trailed with one oar through a pad of buds all-unaware of change, stole from the overhanging thickets through a high-walled pass, where, on the open lake, the broad, silent, yellow light crept from bloom to bloom and awoke them with a touch.  How perfectly they put off sleep! with what a queenly calm displayed their spotless snow, their priceless gold, and shed abroad their matchless scent!  He twined his finger round a slippery serpent-stem, turned the crimson underside of the floating pavilion, and brought up a waxen wonder from its throne to hang like a star in the black braids on her temple.  An hour’s harvesting among the nymphs, in this rich atmosphere of another world, and with a loaded boat they turned to shore again.

“Smothered in sweets!” exclaimed Mr. Raleigh, as he sprang out, and woke Helen Heath, where, slipped down upon the floor of the boat, her head fallen on her arms, she had lain half-asleep.  They were the first words spoken during the morning, and in such situations silence is dangerous.

When the rest of the family descended to breakfast, they found the pictures framed in wreaths of lilies, great floats of them in hall and parlor, and the table laden with flat dishes where with coiled stems they crowded, a white, magnificent throng.  Mr. Raleigh still lingered, and, while Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen renewed their toilets, had busied himself in weaving a crown of these and another of poppy-leaves, hanging the one on Mrs. Laudersdale’s head, as she entered refreshed, snowy, and fragrant herself, and the sleep-giving things on Helen’s,—­the latter avenging herself by surveying her companion’s adornment, and, as she adjusted the bloom-gray leaves of her own, inquiring if olives grew pickled.

Nothing could be more airy and blithe than were Mrs. Laudersdale’s spirits all that morning,—­bubbles dancing on a brook, nor foam-sparkle of rosy Champagne.  She related their adventures with graphic swiftness, and improvised dangers and escapes with such a reckless disregard of truth that Mr. Raleigh was forced to come to the rescue with more startling improbabilities than they would have encountered in the Enchanted Forest.

The red dawn brought its rain, and before they rose from table the sunshine withdrew and large drops began to patter in good earnest.  Mr. Raleigh, who had generally suffered others to entertain him, now, as Mrs. McLean ushered the whole company into the sewing-room, seemed spurred by gayety and brilliance, and to bring into employ all those secrets through which he had ever annihilated time.  For a while devoting himself to the elder dames, he won the heart of one by a laborious invention of a million varicolored angles to a square barley-corn of worsted—­work, involved Mrs. McLean’s crocheting in an inextricable labyrinth as he endeavored to afford her some requisite conchological assistance, and turned with three strokes a very absurd drawing of Mrs. Laudersdale’s into a splendid