They began a gentle ascent, when directly across their way stretched the blue water of a lake.
"Is here where we take the plunge?" inquired Douglas.
"No indeed!" answered Leslie. "Here we speed until we gather such momentum that we shoot across the water and alight on the opposite bank without stopping. Make your landing neatly, Rogers!"
"Why have we never been here before?" marvelled Douglas. "I don't remember any other road one-half so inviting. Just look ahead here! See what a beautiful picture!" He indicated a vine of creeping blackberry spreading over gold sand, its rough, deeply serrated leaves of most artistic cutting, with tufts of snowy bloom surrounding dark-tipped stamens in their centres.
"Isn't it!" answered Mr. Winton. "You know what Whitman said of it?"
"I'm not so well read in Whitman as you are."
"Which is your distinct loss," said Mr. Winton. "It was he who wrote,
'A running blackberry would adorn the parlours of Heaven.'"
"And so it would!" exclaimed Douglas. "What a frieze that would make for a dining-room! Have you ever seen it used?"
"Never," answered Leslie, "or many other of our most exquisite forms of wild growth."
"What beautiful country!" Douglas commented a minute later as the car sped from the swamp, ran uphill, and down a valley between stretches of tilled farm land on either side, sloping back to the lakes now growing distant, then creeping up a gradual incline until Atwater flashed into sight.