I was born to set it right," and I was convinced that he wore his Irving wig, no matter what lines he spouted. In the evenings, as we lay after supper at Sunset Point, watching the colours fade and the stars appear, it was the exception if he did not murmur to himself "... the stars came out, over that summer sea," and then declaim in his great voice the whole of "The Revenge" which ends "I, Sir Richard Grenville, die!"--his tall figure silhouetted against the sunset, his voice echoing among the pines behind him.
Considerations for the future were deliberately shelved; we lived in the present, as wise men should; New York, we knew, lay waiting for us, but we agreed to let it wait. My father's suggestion--"your right course is to return to Toronto, find work, and live down your past"--was a counsel of perfection I disregarded. New York, the busy, strenuous, go-ahead United States, offered the irresistible lure of a promised land, and we both meant to try our fortunes there. How we should reach it, or what we should do when we did reach it, were problems whose solution was postponed.
On looking back I can only marvel at the patience with which neither tired of the other. Perhaps it was perfect health that made squabbles so impossible. Nor was there any hint of monotony, strange to say. We had many an escape, upsetting in wild weather, losing our way in the trackless forests of the mainland, climbing or felling trees, but some Pan-like deity looked after us.... The spirit of Shelley, of course, haunted me day and night; "Prometheus Unbound," pages of which I knew by heart, lit earth and sky, peopled the forests, turned stream and lake alive, and made every glade and sandy bay a floor for dancing silvery feet: "Oh, follow, follow, through the caverns hollow; As the song floats thou pursue, Where the wild bee never flew...." I still hear Kay's heavy voice, a little out of tune, singing to my fiddle the melody I made for it. And how he used to laugh! Always at himself, but also at and with most other things,
an infectious, jolly wholesome laughter, inspired by details
