RUNNING WATERS 



157 



stream is a long, thin island of earth and rocks, 

 its top capped with pines, and its shores 

 fringed with willows turning their silvery 

 leaves in the wind. The prow of the island, so 

 to speak, is usually of hard rock or compact 

 gravel, and it seems to cleave the river in twain, 

 leaving the two halves to spin away on either 

 side, much as the waters seem to hurry by the 

 sides of a great ship at full speed. 



And how the river does sweep along this Valley 

 Track ! It does not babble and chatter, or pitch 

 and toss, like a shallow brook, yet it is merely 

 the brook come to maturity and sobered by 

 mass and volume. Its murmur is hoarser, its 

 bed smoother, its course less interrupted ; yet 

 still the life of it is in its movement. Sweep 

 and glide, sweep and glide ! In and out of bend 

 and basin, around and about rocks and islands, 

 now fast, now slow, now complaining over shal- 

 lows, now soundless over depths, regardless of 

 obstacles or difficulties, it keeps moving, keeps 

 moving. In storm and calm, under sun, moon, 

 and stars, the flow is forever slipping seaward. 



One would hardly suspect that the smooth, 

 lapping waves that feel so soft to the hand 

 trailed in the water from the side of a canoe 

 those waves that glitter so innocently in the 



