you are.”

Lora shook her head, but I somehow felt that the shortcake would materialize, and then Kee and I went out on the lake.

We went in a small motor launch, and he proposed that I should have a survey of the lake before we began to fish.

“It’s one of the most beautiful and picturesque lakes in the county,” he said, and I could easily believe that, as we continually came upon more and more rugged coves and strange rock formations.

“Those are dells,” Kee said, pointing to weird and wonderful rocks that disclosed caves, grottoes, chasms, natural bridges and here and there cascades and waterfalls. “Please be duly impressed, Gray, for they are really wonderful. You know Wisconsin is the oldest state of all, I mean as to its birth. Geologists say that this whole continent was an ocean, and when the first island was thrust up above the surface of the waters, it was Wisconsin itself. Then the earth kindly threw up the other states, and so, here we are.”

“I thought all these lakes were glacial.”

“Oh, yes, so they are. But you don’t know much, do you? The glacial period came along a lot later, and as the slow-moving fields of ice plowed down through this section they scooped out the Mississippi valley, the beds of the Great Lakes and also the beds of innumerable little lakes. There are seven thousand in Wisconsin, and two thousand in Oneida County alone.”

“I am duly impressed, Kee, but quite as much by the way you rattle off this information as by the knowledge itself. Where’d you get it all?”

“Out of the Automobile Book,” he returned, unabashed. “Most interesting reading. Better have a shy at it some time.”

“I will. Now is this Pleasure Dome we’re coming to?”

“Yes. Thought you’d like to see it. It’s really a wonder house, you know. We’ll be invited there to dine or something, but I want you to see it now as a picture.”

It was impressive, the great pile rising against the background of dark trees, and with a foreground of brilliant flower beds, fountains, and arbours.

A critic might call it too ornate, too elaborate, but he would have to admit it was beautiful.

A building of pure white marble, its lines were simple and true, its proportions 

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