In the afternoon - fire down to embers, books stashed, and the mercury up to 55 - a lazy paddle upstream disclosed here and there a maple and birch dappled with yellows and reds and distinctly paler greens. That evening, from the hammocks, one could hear the nighthawks tuning up and glom the bats showing their considerable stuff over the river. A fingernail of a moon rose in a velvet field of stars.

We retreated from the deepening chill into the cabin and put a match to the logs in the main fireplace.

She returned to her book, I to "Old Boys." The old Lab, almost fully white on the snout, set to snoring in front of the fire. On the wall nearby hung a framed saying displayed there for four decades: Old books to read, old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust.

In mid-August, there, getting cold; in one's mid-60s, getting old. This is later, or the beginning of it. There could be no better place than a Rivendell to recognize it and start enjoying it, and to appreciate anew the two regimens that make a man serious - commitment and solitude.