“The beef-steak and the mutton-chops will do for breakfast; now, then, with your bear!”

“Haw, haw!” guffawed Cancut; and the sound, taking the lake at a stride, found echoes everywhere, till he grew silent and peered suspiciously into the dark.

“There’s more bears raound ’n yer kin shake a stick at,” said one of the muskrateers.  “I wouldn’t ricommend yer to stir ’em up naow, haowlin’ like that.”

“I meant it for laffin’,” said Cancut, humbly.

“Ef yer call that ‘ere larfin’, couldn’t yer cry a little to kind er slick daown the bears?” said the trapper.

Iglesias now invited us to chocolat a la creme, made with the boon of the ex-bar-keeper.  I suppose I may say, without flattery, that this tipple was marvellous.  What a pity Nature spoiled a cook by making the muddler of that chocolate a painter of grandeurs!  When Fine Art is in a man’s nature, it must exude, as pitch leaks from a pine-tree.  Our muskrat-hunters partook injudiciously of this unaccustomed dainty, and were visited with indescribable Nemesis.  They had never been acclimated to chocolate, as had Iglesias and I, by sipping it under the shade of the mimosa and the palm.

Up to a certain point, an unlucky hunter is more likely to hunt than a lucky.  Satiety follows more speedily upon success than despair upon failure.  Let us thank Heaven for that, brethren dear!  I had bagged not a bear, and must needs satisfy my assassin instincts upon something with hoofs and horns.  The younger trapper of muskrat, being young, was ardent,—­being young, was hopeful,—­being young, believed in exceptions to general rules,—­and being young, believed, that, given a good fellow with a gun, Nature would provide a victim.  Therefore he proposed that we should canoe it along the shallows in this sweetest and stillest of all the nights.  The senior shook his head incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.

“Since you have massacred all the bears,” said Iglesias, “I will go lay me down in their lair in the barn.  If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa Major when you come back, make a pun and he will go.”

It was stiller than stillness upon the lake.  Ripogenus, it seemed, had never listened to such silence as this.  Calm never could have been so beyond the notion of calm.  Stars in the empyrean and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly as boys at a boarding-school table.

I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and rifle on either side.  The pilot gave one stroke of his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed the lake.  Whatever we were poised and floating upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.