12 PEPACTON: A SUMMER VOYAGE. 



minds : its waters cannot long agree to go all in the 

 game channel, and whichever branch I took I was 

 pretty sure to wish I had taken one of the others. I 

 was constantly sticking on rifts, where I would have 

 to dismount, or running full tilt into willow banks, 

 where I would lose my hat or endanger my fishing 

 tackle. On the whole, the result of my first day's 

 voyaging was not encouraging. I made barely eight 

 miles, and my ardor was a good deal dampened, to 

 say nothing about my clothing. In mid-afternoon 

 I went to a well-to-do-looking farm-house and got 

 gome milk, which I am certain the thrifty housewife 

 skimmed, for its blueness infected my spirits, and I 

 went into camp that night more than half persuaded 

 to abandon the enterprise in the morning. The lone- 

 liness of the river, too, unlike that of the fields and 

 woods, to which I was more accustomed, oppressed 

 me. In the woods things are close to you, and you 

 touch them and seem to interchange something with 

 them ; but upon the river, even though it be a nar- 

 row and shallow one like this, you are more isolated, 

 farther removed from the soil and its attractions, and 

 an easier prey to the unsocial demons. The long, 

 unpeopled vistas ahead ; the still, dark eddies ; the 

 endless monotone and soliloquy of the stream ; the 

 unheeding rocks basking like monsters along the 

 shore, half out of the water, half in ; a solitary heron 

 starting up here and there, as you rounded some 

 jioint, and flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to 

 view, or standing like a gaunt spectre on the um 



