4 PEPACTON 



this day and on subsequent days that the Delaware 

 has a way of dividing up that is very embarrassing 

 to the navigator. It is a stream of many minds: 

 its waters cannot long agree to go all in the same 

 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 farmhouse and got 

 some 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 per- 

 suaded to abandon the enterprise in the morning. 

 The loneliness 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 narrow 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 



