DUMB INTIMACIES 



Such acquaintance as we struck up with the 

 sweet water was really a private and confidential 

 understanding. We did not insult it with any 

 social functions or have any other critics on the 

 bank than the muskrats and mud-turtles that 

 looked at us through the branches. We stripped 

 ourselves down to an instant comradeship. 

 Everywhere else in the world we should have 

 put on precautionary &quot; duds,&quot; which seems to 

 me now very much like putting on a mask when 

 you are about to say your prayers. No one 

 knows how abominable it is to be rolled up in 

 wet rags except those fellows who have walked 

 in puris naturalibus into some of the private 

 grottoes of Nature where there is no immodesty 

 and no fear. How the flesh exults when it feels 

 the contact of the element. How astonishingly 

 .white one looks against the dusks and shadows. 

 What a new sense of benignity to lie down in 

 the pellucid drift and measure its going by the 

 caresses it flings on its way. What douche was 

 comparable to those cascades that went down our 

 backs as we sat under that old dam ? Those 

 persons who use water only to wash themselves 

 with degrade it, and it generally becomes a very 

 serious servant to them. To Charlie and me it 

 had no duty to perform but to frolic, and we 

 heard it calling to us in soft tones long before we 

 reached the dam. 



This new relationship of man to Things was 

 what I meant when I said it was a kind of natural 

 faith, but it is Brahminical rather than Christian. 



63 



