232 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



way to footway, and you are in another order. Almost 

 you hear different sounds. Certainly you smell differ- 

 ent odours, see different flowers, and your range of 

 vision expands to its accustomed horizon. So the land 

 below the river bank forever retains its charm of a shy, 

 secluded personality that must be sought, and one which 

 is therefore comparatively unknown. 



Our river twists and turns through the rich sandy 

 loam of the flat Canaan plains, running more than ten 

 miles between two towns that are but six miles apart 

 by road, and dropping but eighteen inches in the entire 

 distance. It averages, perhaps, one hundred to one 

 hundred and fifty feet across. You might not suppose, 

 to see its quiet brown water mirroring the banks, that the 

 current would ever be strong enough to alter the bed. 

 But in Spring the freshets come down till the water 

 level often rises six feet or more, overflowing the banks 

 and lopping off in the course of a few years an acre on 

 one side of a bend, to deposit it on the other side farther 

 down the stream. If land values were higher in this 

 valley, there might be pretty chances for litigation ! One 

 of the first interests the river awakes is this of the 

 shifting current. 



The bottom meadows, varying in width from two or 

 three miles to less than a quarter of a mile, are flanked 

 by wooded mountain walls, dome after dome, with here 

 and there a pasture running up the slope into the timber. 

 Where the meadow joins the high land on either side are 



