“I wish you could manage to enjoy it,” said Max, “without missing every other stroke, and digging me so unmercifully in the back with your oar-handle; if you can’t, I must ask you to change seats with me, and let me take the bow-oar.”
“How natural and refreshing that sounds!” cried Morton, laughing; “it is a sure token that prospects are brightening, and serious dangers are over, when we find ourselves again in a condition to scold about trifles.”
“It isn’t such a trifle, to be thumped and mauled with the butt of an oar, as I have been all the while Browne was singing, and rhapsodising, and going into ecstasies about the beauty of the morning; which is just such another as we have had ever since we have been here; all the difference being in his feelings, which happen to be a shade or two less doleful than usual, and so cause things to look brighter.”
“Perhaps you would have me believe,” answered Browne, “that the sun will invariably shine when I chance to be in good spirits, and that a thunder-storm would be the natural consequence of my having a fit of the blues?”
“I should be sorry if that were the case,” replied Max, “as we should then be sure to have a large average of bad weather.”
“This excursion reminds me of our school-days,” said Arthur; “it almost seems as though we were once more starting off together, on one of our Saturday rambles, as we have so often done on fine summer and autumn mornings at home.”
“I think I shall never forget those forays through the woods,” said Morton, “over hill and hollow, in search of nuts, or berries, or wild-grapes, or meadow-plums—the fishing and swimming in summer, the snow-balling, and sledding, and skating, in winter! an innocent and happy set of urchins we were then!”
“Really,” said Max, laughing, “to hear you one would suppose that we were now a conclave of venerable, grey-haired sages, scarcely able to remember the time when we were children, and so full of wisdom and experience, that we had long ago ceased to be ‘innocent and happy.’”
“Without professing to be so wise or experienced, as to be very unhappy on that account,” returned Morton, “I suppose I may say that I am old enough, and sufficiently changed since those days, to feel, as I now look back upon them with a sigh, their peculiar happiness, so unlike any thing that after-life affords.”
“How singular it is,” said Browne, “that you four who were playmates when children, should have happened to keep together so long.”