10 A SUMMER BOATING TRIP 



more than half persuaded to abandon the enterprise 

 in the morning. The lonehness of the river, too, unhke 

 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 vou 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 vour 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 w^oods 

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

 salved my spirits. A cold spring run came down off 



