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Any further fussy complaining of this little craft was drowned by the Commodore reading aloud. He had bethought him of a book containing some chapters on Brandon that we had got from the manor-house. Toward the last of our stay in Chippoak Creek, the weather was bad; but it was surprising how agreeable disagreeable days could be at Brandon.
Relinquishing our plan of visiting Brandon, we ran back to our Chippoak harbour, and our anchor went to bed in the creek as the sun went down. It was late on the following afternoon when Gadabout was out of the creek, out in the river, and bound for the little pier marked Brandon.
Now, Gadabout began to sidle toward the port bank of the river as our next harbour, Chippoak Creek, was on that side. Here the shore grew steep; and at one point high up we caught glimpses of the little village of Claremont. At its pier lay a three-masted schooner and several barges and smaller boats.
She was smoking vigorously on the day that we bade good-bye to Chippoak Creek. That was a glorious morning one of those mornings when the sun tries to warm the northwest wind and the northwest wind tries to chill the sun, and between the two a tonic gets into the air and people want to do things.
A part of the sketch is marked "a corner of the garden." Off at one side of the old map, we found our landing-place in the woods beside some wavy lines that, a neat clerkly hand informed us in pale brown ink, were the "meanderings of Chippoak Creek."
In the gloaming the side-lights were being put in place, and Gadabout turned a baleful green eye upon us, as though overhearing our talk of such unnautical things as gardens and heirlooms and ancestral halls. Next morning there was much puffing of engines and ringing of signal bells down in Chippoak Creek. Gadabout went ahead and backed and sidled.
Along the water's edge were mills, their steam and smoke drifting lazily across the face of the bluffs. On a little farther, we came to the mouth of Chippoak Creek with the bluffs of Claremont on one hand, the sweeping, wooded shores of Brandon on the other, and, in between, a beautiful expanse of water, wide enough for a river and possibly deep enough for a heavy dew.
Day after day, we lay in our beautiful harbour of Chippoak Creek as the last of the summer-time went by and as autumn began to fly her bright signal flags in the trees along the shore. Sometimes we moored in the little depression that Nature had scooped out for us close by the Brandon woods; sometimes we scrambled out from it at high tide and went across and cast anchor by the Claremont shore.
From kindly responses to our notes of inquiry, we also knew that long-suffering Virginia courtesy was not yet quite exhausted, and that it still swung wide the doors of those old manor-houses to even the passing stranger. Our next harbour was to be Chippoak Creek, which empties into the river about twelve miles above Jamestown Island.
When our anchors came up out of the friendly mud of Chippoak Creek, we let the northwest wind push us across the flats and into the channel. Then we summoned the engines to do their duty. The port one responded promptly, but the other would do nothing; and as we ran out of the creek and headed up the river, the Commodore was appealing to the obdurate machine with a screwdriver and a monkey-wrench.
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