And we did fill up, and then we started, and in spite of the heat, we enjoyed the walk. It was after three and it would need the pencil of a poet and artist combined to tell of the wonders and the beauties of that walk with the delicate indications of the coming dawn filling the east with rosy promise.
Marsh’s Pond is about two miles long and a half a mile wide, and it has at one point a sandy beach. Around it are cottages and bathing houses, most of them bearing the idyllic names that lake dwellers love to bestow upon their houses. We passed “The Inglenook” and “The Ingleside” and “Inglewild,” and “Tramp’s Rest,” and many another bearing equally felicitous titles, and at last we came to the sandy beach just as the sun cast its first golden beams on the foliage of the woods across the lake.
“Hepburn, you’re a brick for waking up so early,” said Tom. “If only I had thought to bring along my little flask. It’s just the thing before a morning swim.”
“If you don’t mind Scotch,” said Hepburn, producing a cunning little silver flask.
Ellery was on the water wagon, but the rest of us drank to the rising sun and then plunged in and were cool.
“It was worth the walk,” said Benedict, as he dove and emerged twenty feet beyond. “Why don’t people do this every day?”
With the sun had come a gentle breeze that was several degrees cooler than the surrounding atmosphere had been, and we spent a pleasant half hour admiring the coming of day from our watery vantage.
After we had come out we went into the bathing house, which went by the name of Tramp’s Rest. It was a roomy affair, and had been left open all winter, or we would have been unable to enter it.
“We’ll put up a shack like that,” said Tom, “and Jack and Billy can bunk in it.”
“I’m afraid we haven’t lumber enough,” said I.