She led the way through the garden to the lane running past her cottage, where Tobias sat in solitary dignity on the doorstep, down the lane to where it merged in to what was nothing more than a field path.

“Are we going to the lake?” Hilary asked.

Jane nodded.

“But not out on the water,” Josie said. 
“You’re taking us too far below the pier for that.”

Jane smiled quietly.  “It’ll be on the water—­what you’re going to see,” she was getting a good deal of pleasure out of her small mystery, and when they reached the low shore, fringed with the tall sea-grass, she took her party a few steps along it to where an old log lay a little back from the water.  “I reckon we’ll have to wait a bit,” she said, “but it’ll be ’long directly.”

They sat down in a row, the young people rather mystified.  Apparently the broad expanse of almost motionless water was quite deserted.  There was a light breeze blowing and the soft swishing of the tiny waves against the bank was the only sound to break the stillness; the sky above the long irregular range of mountains on the New York side, still wore its sunset colors, the lake below sending hack a faint reflection of them.

But presently these faded until only the afterglow was left, to merge in turn into the soft summer twilight, through which the stars began to glimpse, one by one.

The little group had been mostly silent, each busy with his or her thoughts; so far as the young people were concerned, happy thoughts enough; for if the closing of each day brought their summer nearer to its ending, the fall would bring with it new experiences, an entering of new scenes.

“There!” Sextoness Jane broke the silence, pointing up the lake, to where a tiny point of red showed like a low-hung star through the gathering darkness.  Moment by moment, other lights came into view, silently, steadily, until it seemed like some long, gliding sea-serpent, creeping down towards them through the night.

“A tow!” Josie cried under her breath.

They had all seen it, times without number, before.  The long line of canal boats being towed down the lake to the canal below; the red lanterns at either end of each boat showing as they came.  But to-night, infected perhaps, by the pride, the evident delight, in Jane’s voice, the old familiar sight held them with the new interest the past months had brought to bear upon so many old, familiar things.

“It is—­wonderful,” Pauline said at last.  “It might be a scene from—­fairyland, almost.”

“Me—­I love to see them come stealing long like that through the dark,” Jane said slowly and a little hesitatingly.  It was odd to be telling confidences to anyone except Tobias.  “I don’t know where they come from, nor where they’re a-going to.  Many’s the night I walk over here just on the chance of seeing one.  Mostly, this time of year, you’re pretty likely to catch one.  When I was younger,