incredulously; Iglesias shook his head noddingly.
“Since you have massacred all the bears,” said Iglesias, “I will go lay me down in their lair in the barn. If you find me cheek-by-jowl with Ursa Major when you come back, make a pun and he will go.”
It was stiller than stillness upon the lake. Ripogenus, it seemed, had never listened to such silence as this. Calm never could have been so beyond the notion of calm. Stars in the empyrean and stars in Ripogenus winked at each other across ninety-nine billions of leagues as uninterruptedly as boys at a boarding-school table.
I knelt amidships in the birch with gun and rifle on either side. The pilot gave one stroke of his paddle, and we floated out upon what seemed the lake. Whatever we were poised and floating upon he hesitated to shatter with another dip of his paddle, lest he should shatter the thin basis and sink toward heaven and the stars.
Presently the silence seemed to demand gentle violence, and the unwavering water needed slight tremors to teach it the tenderness of its calm; then my guide used his blade, and cut into glassiness. We crept noiselessly along by the lake-edge, within the shadows of the pines. With never a plash we slid. Bare drops fell from the cautious paddle and tinkled on the surface, overshot, not parted by, our imponderable passage. Sometimes from far within the forest would come
