Little Rivers [13]
is as transparent as glass--
old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a
tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches.
Twelve feet down in the narrow chasm below the falls, where the
water is full of tiny bubbles, like Apollinaris, you can see the
trout poised, with their heads up-stream, motionless, but quivering
a little, as if they were strung on wires.
The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here
and there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of
loose stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great
boulders have been rolled down the alleyway and left where they
chanced to stick; the stream must get around them or under them as
best it can. But there are other places where everything has been
swept clean; nothing remains but the primitive strata, and the
flowing water merrily tickles the bare ribs of mother earth.
Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut well-holes in the
rock, as round and even as if they had been made with a drill, and
sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well lying at
the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through
which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into
which the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring
it very steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away
without a ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which
shelves down from the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.
The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor.
The water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope
seems very even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising.
Only one step more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his
feet begin to slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the
rod held high above his head, as if it must on no account get wet,
he glides forward up to his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with
amazement. There have been other and more serious situations in
life into which, unless I am mistaken, you have made an equally
unwilling and embarrassed entrance, and in which you have been
surprised to find yourself not only up to your neck, but over,--and
you are a lucky man if you have had the presence of mind to stand
still for a moment, before wading out, and make sure at least of
the fish that tempted you into your predicament.
But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by
miners out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy
water-power to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only
in the valley of remembrance that its current still flows like
liquid air; and only in that country that you can still see the
famous men who came and went along the banks of the Lyocoming when
the boy was there.
There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or
dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of
trout which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house
in a line of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had
this Collins also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in
a Coal-Mine," and other profound ditties in a way to make all the
glasses on the table jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather
a fishy character, and undeserving of the unqualified respect which
the boy had for him. And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical,
kindly, a skilful though reluctant physician, who regarded it as a
personal injury if any one in the party fell sick in summer time;
and a passionately unsuccessful hunter, who would sit all night in
the crotch of a tree beside an alleged deer-lick, and come home
perfectly satisfied if he had heard a hedgehog grunt. It was he
who called attention to the discrepancy between the boy's appetite
and his size by saying loudly at a picnic, "I wouldn't grudge you
what you
old-fashioned window-glass, I mean, in small panes, with just a
tinge of green in it, like the air in a grove of young birches.
Twelve feet down in the narrow chasm below the falls, where the
water is full of tiny bubbles, like Apollinaris, you can see the
trout poised, with their heads up-stream, motionless, but quivering
a little, as if they were strung on wires.
The bed of the stream has been scooped out of the solid rock. Here
and there banks of sand have been deposited, and accumulations of
loose stone disguise the real nature of the channel. Great
boulders have been rolled down the alleyway and left where they
chanced to stick; the stream must get around them or under them as
best it can. But there are other places where everything has been
swept clean; nothing remains but the primitive strata, and the
flowing water merrily tickles the bare ribs of mother earth.
Whirling stones, in the spring floods, have cut well-holes in the
rock, as round and even as if they had been made with a drill, and
sometimes you can see the very stone that sunk the well lying at
the bottom. There are long, straight, sloping troughs through
which the water runs like a mill-race. There are huge basins into
which the water rumbles over a ledge, as if some one were pouring
it very steadily out of a pitcher, and from which it glides away
without a ripple, flowing over a smooth pavement of rock which
shelves down from the shallow foot to the deep head of the pool.
The boy wonders how far he dare wade out along that slippery floor.
The water is within an inch of his boot-tops now. But the slope
seems very even, and just beyond his reach a good fish is rising.
Only one step more, and then, like the wicked man in the psalm, his
feet begin to slide. Slowly, and standing bolt upright, with the
rod held high above his head, as if it must on no account get wet,
he glides forward up to his neck in the ice-cold bath, gasping with
amazement. There have been other and more serious situations in
life into which, unless I am mistaken, you have made an equally
unwilling and embarrassed entrance, and in which you have been
surprised to find yourself not only up to your neck, but over,--and
you are a lucky man if you have had the presence of mind to stand
still for a moment, before wading out, and make sure at least of
the fish that tempted you into your predicament.
But Rocky Run, they say, exists no longer. It has been blasted by
miners out of all resemblance to itself, and bewitched into a dingy
water-power to turn wheels for the ugly giant, Trade. It is only
in the valley of remembrance that its current still flows like
liquid air; and only in that country that you can still see the
famous men who came and went along the banks of the Lyocoming when
the boy was there.
There was Collins, who was a wondrous adept at "daping, dapping, or
dibbling" with a grasshopper, and who once brought in a string of
trout which he laid out head to tail on the grass before the house
in a line of beauty forty-seven feet long. A mighty bass voice had
this Collins also, and could sing, "Larboard Watch, Ahoy!" "Down in
a Coal-Mine," and other profound ditties in a way to make all the
glasses on the table jingle; but withal, as you now suspect, rather
a fishy character, and undeserving of the unqualified respect which
the boy had for him. And there was Dr. Romsen, lean, satirical,
kindly, a skilful though reluctant physician, who regarded it as a
personal injury if any one in the party fell sick in summer time;
and a passionately unsuccessful hunter, who would sit all night in
the crotch of a tree beside an alleged deer-lick, and come home
perfectly satisfied if he had heard a hedgehog grunt. It was he
who called attention to the discrepancy between the boy's appetite
and his size by saying loudly at a picnic, "I wouldn't grudge you
what you