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 howtheriver 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 scaward. 
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! 
The river 
island. 
Hurrying 
water. 
