They didn’t spend all their days on the island. They spent more than half of them wandering at will through the enchanted¹ Muskoka country. Barney knew the woods as a book and he taught their lore² and craft to Valancy. He could always find trail and haunt of the shy wood people. Valancy learned the different fairy-likenesses of the mosses—the charm and exquisiteness⁴ of woodland blossoms. She learned to know every bird at sight and mimic⁶ its call—though never so perfectly⁷ as Barney. She made friends with every kind of tree. She learned to paddle a canoe as well as Barney himself. She liked to be out in the rain and she never caught cold.

 

Sometimes they took a lunch with them and went berrying—strawberries and blueberries. How pretty blueberries were—the dainty green of the unripe⁸ berries, the glossy⁹ pinks and scarlets¹⁰ of the half ripes, the misty¹¹ blue of the fully¹² matured! And Valancy learned the real flavour of the strawberry in its highest perfection. There was a certain sunlit dell on the banks of Mistawis along which white birches grew on one side and on the other still, changeless ranks of young spruces. There were long grasses at the roots of the birches, combed down by the winds and wet with morning dew late into the afternoons. Here they found berries that might have graced the banquets of Lucullus, great ambrosial¹³ sweetnesses hanging like

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