THE FEASTING place on No-Man's-Island was a flat rock, facing down the lake to the waterfall.  Robert Smith had done a decent job for once, building the fire of apple logs, now burned down to perfect cooking embers.

By right of ownership James Parker had said the words "Lord, we offer this lamb," bled it, skinned it, cleaned it, and hung it from tall stakes by lengths of that old electric wire for which there were so many uses on the farm.

The scents of apple smoke and roasting lamb set his mouth to water.  "Nearly ready, would you agree?" he said with a formality befitting the occasion.

"We should mebbe turn it the once more," said Smith politely.

They turned the sizzling roast. "It sure does smell yummy," Mary said from the shore nearby.  "Dead man's choke," she said, throwing a long pebble up and out, but it made a big splash, no dead man's choke.

"Wee bezzom, yon was awfy," said her playmate in his awful accent.

"Mind your manners, Ian," said his mum.

But now the time had positively come.  The children were summoned, and James Parker put a final razor sharpness to his carving knife, and the sun stood high above the waterfall, and a sound grew behind them from the north.

The flying machine went low along the Parker side of the valley, turned above the waterfall and flew back along the Smith side of the valley.

The Parkers and the Smiths were stricken dumb.

It was a roaring thing of a mustardy color above the blue water of the lake.  But it flew south again into the sun, gone perhaps, the sound had almost died away.

No, it was growing, changing to a higher pitch.  It came low over the waterfall, almost touching, skimming, touching now, throwing up twin columns of spray from two long canoes that were its feet.

The thing sank deeper, and the roar changed to splutterings, but gathered once more as it swam toward them along the lake, ungainly creature.

The Parkers and the Smiths sat as still as graven images above a fatted lamb, their summer sacrifice and feast, roasted to perfection.

But despite their faults - the one inclined toward too much virtue, the other toward too little - they were men of spirit and they rallied.

"The welcome mat, Robert, eh?" James Parker said.

"The welcome mat, James, it is," said Robert Smith.  Never before had they addressed one another thus familiarly.