There were many things that made it hard to leave the place where we had spent so many happy hours.  There was the rustic seat we had made ourselves, which faced the lake, and on which we had sat and seen the storms gather on Blueberry Island.  It was a comfortable seat with the right slant in its back, and I am still proud of having helped to make it.  There was the breakwater of logs which were placed with such feats of strength, to prevent the erosion of the waves, and which withstood the big storm of September, 1912, when so many breakwaters were smashed to kindling-wood.  We always had intended to make a long box along the top, to plant red geraniums in, but it had not been done.  There was the dressing-tent where the boys ran after their numerous swims, and which had been the scene of many noisy quarrels over lost garments—­garters generally, for they have an elusive quality all their own.  There was also the black-poplar stump which a misguided relative of mine said “no woman could split.”  He made this remark after I had tried in vain to show him what was wrong with his method of attack.  I said that I thought he would do better if he could manage to hit twice in the same place!  And he said that he would like to see me do it, and went on to declare that he would bet me a five-dollar bill that I could not.

If it were not for the fatal curse of modesty I would tell how eagerly I grasped the axe and with what ease I hit, not twice, but half a dozen times in the same place—­until the stump yielded.  This victory was all the sweeter to me because it came right after our sports day when I had entered every available contest, from the nail-driving competition to the fat woman’s race, and had never even been mentioned as among those present!

We closed our cottage on August 24.  That day all nature conspired to make us feel sorry that we were leaving.  A gentle breeze blew over the lake and rasped its surface into dancing ripples that glittered in the sun.  Blueberry Island seemed to stand out clear and bold and beckoning.  White-winged boats lay over against the horizon and the chug-chug of a motor-boat came at intervals in a lull of the breeze.  The more tender varieties of the trees had begun to show a trace of autumn coloring, just a hint and a promise of the ripened beauty of the fall—­if we would only stay!

Before the turn in the road hid it from sight we stopped and looked back at the “Kee-am Cottage”—­my last recollection of it is of the boarded windows, which gave it the blinded look of a dead thing, and of the ferns which grandma had brought from the big woods beyond the railway track and planted all round it, and which had grown so quickly and so rank that they seemed to fill in all the space under the cottage, and with their pale-green, feathery fringe, to be trying to lift it up into the sunshine above the trees.  Instinctively we felt that we had come to the end of a very pleasant chapter in our life as a family; something had disturbed the peaceful quiet of our lives; somewhere a drum was beating and a fife was calling!