10 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 



more than half persuaded 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 accus- 

 tomed, 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 attrac- 

 tions, 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 point, and 

 flapping disconsolately ahead till lost to view, or stand- 

 ing like a gaunt spectre on the umbrageous side of the 

 mountain, his motionless form revealed against the 

 dark green as you passed; the trees and willows and 

 alders that hemmed you in on either side, and hid the 

 fields and the farmhouses and the road that ran 

 near by, these things and others aided the skimmed 

 milk to cast a gloom over my spirits that argued ill 

 for the success of my undertaking. Those rubber boots, 

 too, that parboiled my feet and were clogs of lead about 

 them, whose spirits are elastic enough to endure 

 them? A malediction upon the head of him who in- 

 vented them! Take your old shoes, that will let the 

 water in and let it out again, rather than stand knee- 

 deep all day in these extinguishers. 



I escaped from the river, that first night, and took to 

 the woods, and profited by the change. In the woods 

 I was at home again, and the bed of hemlock boughs 

 jaJvedjgay^_sjirits. A cold spring run came down off 



