CHAPTER XV 

 THE LAND BELOW THE RIVER BANK 



OUR little northern river winds along through 

 the Berkshire intervales, polluted with many a 

 mill and sewer near its source, but running clear 

 again when it breaks into the country south of 

 the Taconics, a pretty stream when glimpsed from 

 road or railway, a binding thread for our mountain 

 landscape, but known aright, after all, only to those 

 who launch boat or canoe upon it, who get down into 

 the land below the bank. 



It is a different world, this land below the river bank, 

 with different inhabitants, a different quality of land- 

 scape, a sense of strangeness perpetually alluring, and a 

 sweet, peaceful mood of languid solitude. You are 

 oddly shut in on the river, alike by high banks and 

 bounding trees, and by your angle of vision, which is 

 lowered many feet from the accustomed. Thus you 

 gain an intimacy with your immediate surroundings, a 

 friendliness with the landscape, elsewhere impossible. 

 When you leave your canoe at the end of your idle 

 afternoon and climb the bank, the sense of transition is 

 sometimes almost startling. Six steps up from water- 



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