As the boats were beached, the boys timidly approached them. The Vice, forgetting his first encounter of the picturesque, accosted them in French, and was somewhat confused by their replies until he learned that the youths were of English parentage, and that they lisped.
The boys were soon reinforced by their father, a tall, modest, but self-reliant looking man, who eyed the camping preparations of the party with an interest which was greater than curiosity, and which was explained afterward by the discovery that he had been of the Argonauts of '49.
The Vice, in his capacity of Statesman, knew the honest farmer as a type, only as the principal element of mass-meetings which he sometimes addressed; the Commodore, when in his editorial chair, knew him principally as a subscriber to be secured; the Cook, when playing scribbler, found the farmer-type useful to contrast with other types, and the Purser, when in his studio, knew him only as an occasional adjunct to a pastoral composition.
But after the self-contained, hard-working, rather lonely and diffident farmer had lounged about the camp for a couple of hours that evening, the party learned, as the city-bred man needs sorely to learn about many another farmer, that the old man could see something in a sunset besides tints reducible into pigments, more in a book than its writer's art, that he knew more of the essentials of politics than the editor and statesman combined, and stranger still, that he cared neither to edit a newspaper nor to run for office.
After a good supper and a cheerful pipe or two, the Commodore, who had been extremely quiet for a few moments, announced that he considered it the proper thing for canoeists to sleep in their boats instead of tents.
"Then," said the Commodore, "if the river rises suddenly, you will be in your boat, instead of having it drift away from you."
"And if you turn over in bed, in such case," remarked the Vice, "you'll never know what drowned you."
The Commodore did not reply, for the real object of suggestion was to emphasize one point of superiority of the Red Lake model, after which his own boat and the Cook's were built, over the Chrysalid model affected by the other two mariners. But the Commodore's will was law, and that night the four men slept each in his own canoe, a rubber blanket thrown across a line extending from mast to mast affording protection from dew and possible rain.
