Bob gave a whistle of admiration, and walked on.

“I wish some of our oarsmen could see that,” he said to himself.  “They’re always guying the fellows that tip over their cranky little shells.”

He stopped short.

“I couldn’t do it,” he cried aloud; “nor I couldn’t learn to do it.  I sure am a dub!”

He trudged on, his spirits again at the ebb.  The brightness of the day had dimmed.  Indeed, physically, a change had taken place.  Over the sun banked clouds had drawn.  With the disappearance of the sunlight a little breeze, before but a pleasant and wandering companion to the birds, became cold and draughty.  The leaf carpet proved to be soggy; and as for the birds themselves, their whistles suddenly grew plaintive as though with the portent of late autumn.

This sudden transformation, usual enough with every passing cloud in the childhood of the spring, reacted still further on Bob’s spirits.  He trudged doggedly on.  After a time a gleam of water caught his attention to the left.  He deserted the River Trail, descended a slope, pushed his way through a thicket of tamaracks growing out from wire grass and puddles, and found himself on the shores of a round lake.

It was a small body of water, completely surrounded by tall, dead brown grasses.  These were in turn fringed by melancholy tamaracks.  The water was dark slate colour, and ruffled angrily by the breeze which here in the open developed some slight strength.  It reminded Bob of a “bottomless” lake pointed out many years before to his childish credulity.  A lonesome hell diver flipped down out of sight as Bob appeared.

The wet ground swayed and bent alarmingly under his tread.  A stub attracted him.  He perched on the end of it, his feet suspended above the wet, and abandoned himself to reflection.  The lonesome diver reappeared.  The breeze rustled the dead grasses and the tamaracks until they seemed to be shivering in the cold.

Bob was facing himself squarely.  This was his first grapple with the world outside.  To his direct American mind the problem was simplicity in the extreme.  An idler is a contemptible being.  A rich idler is almost beneath contempt.  A man’s life lies in activity.  Activity, outside the artistic and professional, means the world of business.  All teaching at home and through the homiletic magazines, fashionable at that period, pointed out but one road to success in this world—­the beginning at the bottom, as Bob was doing; close application; accuracy; frugality; honesty; fair dealing.  The homiletic magazines omitted idealism and imagination; but perhaps those qualities are so common in what some people are pleased to call our humdrum modern business life that they were taken for granted.  If a young man could not succeed in this world, something was wrong with him.  Can Bob be blamed that in this baffling and unsuspected incapacity he found a great humility of spirit?  In his fashion he began to remember trifling significances which at the time had meant little to him.  Thus, a girl had once told him, half seriously: