But the sun is declining low.  The club-boats are out, and from island to island in the distance these shafts of youthful life shoot swiftly across.  There races some swift Atalanta, with no apple to fall in her path but some soft and spotted oak-apple from an overhanging tree; there the Phantom, with a crew white and ghostlike in the distance, glimmers in and out behind the headlands, while yonder wherry glides lonely across the smooth expanse.  The voices of all these oarsmen are dim and almost inaudible, being so far away; but one would scarcely wish that distance should annihilate the ringing laughter of these joyous girls, who come gliding, in a safe and heavy boat, they and some blue dragon-flies together, around yonder wooded point.

Many a summer afternoon have I rowed joyously with these same maidens beneath these steep and garlanded shores; many a time have they pulled the heavy four-oar, with me as coxswain at the helm,—­the said patient steersman being oft-times insulted by classical allusions from rival boats, satirically comparing him to an indolent Venus drawn by doves, while the oarswomen in turn were likened to Minerva with her feet upon a tortoise.  Many were the disasters in the earlier days of feminine training;—­first of toilet, straw hats blowing away, hair coming down, hair-pins strewing the floor of the boat, gloves commonly happening to be off at the precise moment of starting, and trials of speed impaired by somebody’s oar catching in somebody’s dress-pocket.  Then the actual difficulties of handling the long and heavy oars,—­the first essays at feathering, with a complicated splash of air and water, as when a wild-duck in rising swims and flies together, and uses neither element handsomely,—­the occasional pulling of a particularly vigorous stroke through the atmosphere alone, and at other times the compensating disappearance of nearly the whole oar beneath the liquid surface, as if some Uncle Kuehleborn had grasped it, while our Undine by main strength tugged it from the beguiling wave.  But with what triumphant abundance of merriment were these preliminary disasters repaid, and how soon outgrown!  What “time” we sometimes made, when nobody happened to be near with a watch, and how successfully we tossed oars in saluting, when the world looked on from a pic-nic!  We had our applauses, too.  To be sure, owing to the age and dimensions of the original barge, we could not command such a burst of enthusiasm as when the young men shot by us in their race-boat;—­but then, as one of the girls justly remarked, we remained longer in sight.

And many a day, since promotion to a swifter craft, have they rowed with patient stroke down the lovely lake, still attended by their guide, philosopher, and coxswain,—­along banks where herds of young birch-trees overspread the sloping valley and ran down in a blaze of sunshine to the rippling water,—­or through the Narrows, where some breeze rocked the boat till trailing shawls and ribbons were water-soaked,