80 BY-WAVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
not a wrinkle, denoting years, in his brow or 
cheeks, and yet you suspected he was old. It 
might have been the rather hard glitter of his 
calm, gray eyes, or the half stolid way in which 
he kept closed his immense hirsute lips, which 
suggested something of senility coupled with 
unusual strength. His bodily movements, too, 
though full of elasticity of a certain sort, 
lacked the ready suppleness of youth, suggest- 
ing instead the half-automatic, perfunctory 
agility of long experience. You occasionally 
see such old men by the sea or in the moun- 
tains. They are men whom age cannot con- 
quer—the men of perfect health. But his boat 
was not so impervious to time and exposure, it 
seemed. A kind of dry rot had attacked it, 
apparently years ago. This, however, seemed 
to have added to its buoyancy, for it danced 
upon the water like a bubble ora feather. I 
could not help, as I glanced from man to boat, 
imagining a sort of rapport between them, and 
presently the odd fancy that, like the centaur 
and the horse, they were really one, took hold 
on my mind so forcibly that I could not re- 
strain a low laugh as we began to glide down 
the stream, so ludicrously did the blending of 
the guide’s gray, old clothes with the sides and 
bottom of the gray, old boat, in color and text- 
ure, enforce the whimsical thought. 
It may as well be stated here that the stream 
upon which we were now afloat ran past the 
guide’s cabin over on the other side of the 
ridge. But to do so it had to make a complete 
double round a great point, after dashing 
through a deep, hidden valley, down stony 
precipices and between the close-drawn walls 
of.a resounding gorge. 
