"So am I," said Grandfather.
They left the machine in a clearing by the roadside, and, laden with nets and bait, made their way through a path among the underbrush, until they stood on the shore of Swan Lake. A blue sky, with here and there a winging cloud, met the low horizon, skirted with the dense green of low-set pine and oak trees. The gray-green water lapped the shore alluringly.
There was a general scramble to remove encumbering shoes and stockings.
"If anybody says, 'Come on in, the water's fine,' they'll owe me a pineapple college ice," Peggy declared, "or, if you prefer it in New York-ese, a pineapple sundae—though why they should think over there that by spelling Sunday with an e, they can make it a soda-fountain dish, I don't know."
"Don't you go jeering at the manners and customs of my native town," Elizabeth cried.
"Did your ancestors own most of New York?" Grandfather asked, innocently. "I thought most of Manhattan Island belonged to the Dutch."
"I don't know what my ancestors owned," Elizabeth said.
"They owned this, for instance," her grandfather waved a nonchalant hand at the beautiful country about him, "forty or fifty acres around these parts. My Great-grandfather Swift, he got kinder tired of having so much property, and he sold a chunk to the town for a cemetery, and one thing and another."
"Where did he live?" Elizabeth asked.
"Up the road apiece, in a great house that was burnt down long before my time. He was quite a likely old fellow, though, from all I can hear of him. He had a lot of stories told about him. He started a bank, and all his money was carted up to it in ox teams, because they didn't have anything but silver money in those days."