Down in the bay the character of the woodland was a little different.  It was of fuller growth, and with many fewer evergreens, and some addition to the variety of the changing deciduous leaves.  When they got quite to the bottom of the bay and were coasting along close under the shore, there was perhaps a more striking display of Autumn’s glories at their side, than the rocks of Shahweetah could shew them.  They coasted slowly along, looking and talking.  The combinations were beautiful.

There was the dark fine bright red of some pepperidges shewing behind the green of an unchanged maple; near by stood another maple the leaves of which were all seemingly withered, a plain reddish light wood-colour; while below its withered foliage a thrifty poison sumach wreathing round its trunk and lower branches, was in a beautiful confusion of fresh green and the orange and red changes, yet but just begun.  Then another slight maple with the same dead wood-coloured leaves, into which to the very top a Virginia creeper had twined itself, and that was now brilliantly scarlet, magnificent in the last degree.  Another like it a few trees off —­ both reflected gorgeously in the still water.  Rock oaks were part green and part sear; at the edge of the shore below them a quantity of reddish low shrubbery; the cornus, dark crimson and red brown, with its white berries shewing underneath, and more pepperidges in very bright red.  One maple stood with its leaves parti-coloured reddish and green —­ another with beautiful orange-coloured foliage.  Ashes in superb very dark purple; they were all changed.  Then alders, oaks, and chestnuts still green.  A kaleidoscope view, on water and land, as the little boat glided along sending rainbow ripples in towards the shore.

In the bottom of the bay Winthrop brought the boat to land, under a great red oak which stood in its fair dark green beauty yet at the very edge of the water.  Mountain Spring was a little way off, hidden by an outsetting point of woods.  As the boat touched the tree-roots, Winthrop laid in the oars and came and took a seat by the boat’s mistress.

“Are you going to walk to Mountain Spring the rest of the way?” she said.

“No.”

“Will the stage-coach take you up here?”

“If it comes, it will.  What are you going to do with yourself now, till I see you again?”

“There’s enough to do,” said Elizabeth sighing.  “I am going to try to behave myself.  How soon will the coach be here now?”

“I think, not until I have seen you about half way over the bay on your way home.”

“O you will not see me,” said Elizabeth.  “I am not going before the coach does.”

“Yes you are.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because it will not come till I have seen you at least, I should judge, half across the bay.”

“But I don’t want to go.”

“You are so unaccustomed to doing things you don’t want to do, that it is good discipline for you.”