"Ugh!" shuddered Phyllis. "Don't talk about fires. Oh, dear!"

"What's wrong now!"

"I'm so stiff I don't think I can take another step. We oughtn't to have rested so long."

But she did take another step, and would have fallen heavily if Herring had not caught her. A moment later she lost a shoe in the ooze, and wasted much precious daylight in vain efforts to locate and recover it.

"Sit down on that root," commanded Herring. And she obeyed. He knelt before her, lifted her wet, muddy little stockinged foot and set it on his knee.

"What size, please, miss?" he asked, giving an excellent imitation of a somewhat officious salesman.

"I don't know; I have them made," said Phyllis wearily, but trying her best to smile.

"Something in this style?" suggested Herring. He had secretly removed one of his own shoes, and handling it with a kind of comic reverence, as if the soggy, muddy thing was a precious work of art, he presented it to her attention.

And then Phyllis smiled without even trying and then laughed.

"I said a shoe," she said, "not a travelling bath-tub."

But he slipped that great shoe over her little foot, and so bound it to her ankle with his handkerchief and necktie that it promised to stay on.

"But you?" she said.

"Luck is with me to-day," said Herring. "Anybody can walk through an impassable swamp, but few are given the opportunity to hop. General Sherman should have thought of that. It would have showed the Confederates just what he thought of them if instead of marching through Georgia he had hopped."

And he pursued this new train of thought for some time. He improvised words to old tunes, and sang them at the top of his lungs: "As we were hopping through Georgia." And last and worst he sang: "There'll be a hop time in the old town to-night." And when he had occasion to address Phyllis directly, he no longer called her Miss Darling, but "Goody Two Shoes." He said that his own name was not Mr. Herring but Mr. Hopper, and that he was a famous cotillon leader.

But even he became a little quiet when the light began to fail, and a little serious.

"Whatever happens," he said, "it will be a great comfort to you to realize that it's entirely my fault. On the other hand, if we had gotten back into that boat, we might have been drowned long before this."

A little later Phyllis said: "I'm about all in. It's too dark to see. I—"

"Couldn't have chosen a better camping site myself," said Herring humbly. "First thing to think of is the water-supply—and fuel. Now, here the fuel grows right out of the water—"

"We haven't any matches."

"Yes, we have; but they are wet and won't light."

"We'll die of cold before morning," said Phyllis; "there's no use pretending we won't."

"On the contrary. Now is the time to pretend all sorts of things. Did you ever try to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together?"