ADVENTURES AND INCIDENTS. 395 



dred and eighty feet in height, the rise of the water is rap- 

 idly exaggerated by the incapability of diffusion ; and the 

 length of its course sometimes concealing beyond the hori- 

 zon the storms by which it is swelled at its source, its lioods 

 then descend with unexpected violence. 



3. Frequently, when the sun is shining in a cloudless 

 sky, and the water scarce ripples over the glittering ford, a 

 deep, hollow sound, a dull, approaching roar, may be heard 

 in the gorges of the river ; and almost before the wading 

 fisherman can gain the shore, a bank of water, loaded with 

 trees and rocks and wreck, will come down three, four, 

 five feet abreast, sweeping all before it in a thunder of foam 

 and ruin. In ordinary cases, after two days of rain, the 

 stream will rise twenty or thirty feet — it has risen nearly 

 ten fathoms in its rocky gulf ; and once, upon this occa- 

 sion, it mounted fifteen feet in a epiarter of an hour. 

 When the day broke, it appeared sweeping through the 

 trees, which the evening before hung fifty feet above its 

 brink, a black, roaring tempest, loaded with ruins and de- 

 bris, from which were seen at times the white skeletons of 

 trees, peeled of their bark, beams and fragments of houses 

 — a cart, a door, a cradle — hurrying and tilting through the 

 foam and spray, like the scattered flotsam of a wreck. 



4. Often have we gone out in a clear, sapphire morning, 

 when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water 

 on the ford was not over our boots ; and when we returned 

 at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines 

 which descended toward the river, have heard a roar as if 

 the world were rolling together down the black trough be- 

 fore us, and, as we came out on the bank, found a furious 

 tempest of water tumbling and plunging and leaping, 

 over stock and rock, twenty feet upon the rocks where we 

 had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morn- 

 ing ; while in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, 

 where the stream was then so still and placid that you 



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