They came out upon the edge of the river which makes a sweep around a sharp corner on the opposite side of which was “Echo Rock.”  There they stood and shouted and laughed as their voices came back upon the still air softened and etherealized.

Becoming tired of this sport at last, the boy picked up a flat stone from the river’s edge and said, “Can thee skip a stone, Pepeeta?  I never saw a girl that could skip a stone.”

“But I am not a girl,” she said.

“Oh, but thee was a girl once, and if thee did not learn then thee cannot do it now.  Come, let me see thee try.  Here is a stone, and a beauty, too; round, flat and smooth.  That stone ought to make sixteen jumps!”

“But you must show me how,” she said.

“All right, I will,” he replied, and sent one skimming along the smooth surface of the water.

“Beautiful,” she said, clapping her hands as it bounded in ever diminishing saltations and with a finer skill than that of Giotto, drew perfect circles on the watery canvas.

Delighted with the applause, the child found another stone and gave it to Pepeeta.  She took it, drew her hand back and tossed it awkwardly from her shoulder.  It sank with a dull plunge into the stream, while out of the throat of the lad came a great and joyous shout of laughter.  “I knew thee could not,” he said.  “No girl that ever lived could skip a stone!”

And then he threw another and another, and they stood enchanted as the beautiful circles widened away from their centers and crossed each other in ever-increasing complexity of curve.

Steven did his best to teach Pepeeta this very simple art; but after many failures, she exclaimed: 

“Oh dear, I shall never learn!  I am nothing but a woman after all!  Let us hasten to the fishing pool, perhaps I shall do better there.”

“Don’t be discouraged.  Thee can learn, if thee tries long enough!” Steven said encouragingly, and led the way to a deep pool a few rods farther up the river.  It was a cool, sequestered, lovely spot.  Great trees overhung it, dark waters swirled swiftly but quietly round the base of a great rock jutting out into it; little bubbles of froth glided dreamily across it and burst on its edges; kingfishers dropped, stone-like, into it from the limbs of a dead sycamore, and the low, deep murmurs of the flood, as it hurried by, whispered inarticulately of mysteries too deep for the mind of man to comprehend.  Except for this ceaseless murmur, silence brooded over the place, for the song-birds had hidden themselves in the wood, and the two intruders upon the sacred privacy, by an unconscious sense of fitness, spoke in whispers.

“Beautiful!” said Pepeeta.

“Hush!  See there!” Steven exclaimed, in an undertone, and pointing to a spot where a fish had broken the still surface as he leaped for a fly and plunged back again into the depths.

His eye glowed, and his whole figure vibrated with excitement.