It was evening. The last suggestion of daylight had faded out in the atmosphere, and the densest gloom enveloped the mountain-sides, and lay as with a pressure on the lake. The darkness was not such as clouds make; it was not the darkness of a veiled sky, of an obscured firmament, but of air possessed through and through, and thick with blackness. A hot night it was, and utterly calm. Not a movement in the air; not a movement on the water; not a sound stirred an aërial wave overhead. Even the loons floated through the gloom without a cry; and the birds of night, perched among the pines, sent forth neither challenge nor call. Amid the gloom a boat was moving ...