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training school), with ribs of ash and a covering of canvas, painted vivid red. Carefully parting my hair in the middle, at my grandfather's solemn advice, I launched forth below the mill pond for my far voyaging, I and another boy, in a rakish canoe, also home-made, called the Stampede. The boys in the swimming hole came racing out like dolphins about our prows, but we beat them off with paddles, and sailed away into a land of wonder. How each river bend ahead lured us on-bends where the willows arched over the water, or a birch dropped a white reflection into the black depths, or the current seemed to widen, grow more sluggish, promising perhaps a mill pond, the excitement of a "carry," the thrill of a strange village! No mystery is quite like the mystery of a river bend, as no curve is quite so beautiful. When you are a boy on your first river voyage you do not pray for an arrow-like course, you welcome each curve and double as a fresh revelation of romance. When the river

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In the gathering darkness you see lights on the water ahead. . . the faces of

bend has lost its charm, then you may know you are middle-aged, indeed, and fit only for automobiles and a luxurious hotel at night.

which beckons, cool and strange in the light before the day. The great trees on the bank behind you rise ethereal, phantom shadows against the ochre dawn. The What memories come back to him who fire snaps yellow and warm. Ahead the has travelled by river ways, of camps re- stream winds into the mystery of the morngretfully left behind or human scenes which ing. You eat your breakfast, strike your he has floated past, ethereal as a dream! tent, load the canoes, douse the embers, There is always a wistful moment of part- which sizzle pathetically, and with a backing from a pleasant camp, on tiny island ward glance of gratitude at your inn beor wooded bank. You rise before the sun neath the stars, you slip down the current is free of the valley fog, plunge in the cold for a new day's adventures. No officious water, catch a fish, perhaps, build up the landlord comes out to the curb to say fire in last night's embers, and while the good-by. No bell-hop is seen running coffee boils you look down the river way to you with a morning paper and an eye

girls flash at you. . . you move through the fairy scene as through a dream. . .

hungry for tips. What the world is doing you neither know nor care. The morning mists are rising from the water. The stream lies clear ahead. The sun is golden on the distant hills. And your paddle digs the water till the little boat leaps with the joy of health and freedom.

Or it may be that twilight steals upon you while you are still paddling in search of a camping place free of the haunts of men, of towns and befouling mills. In the gathering darkness you see lights on the water ahead, hear the sounds of music and voices. Presently you have glided into fairyland. Lawns come down to the water,

gay with Japanese lanterns. The landings are decked with color. Canoes are floating in procession, like bright water flies, with lamps at prow and stern. As your dark and travel-soiled craft shoots into the radius of these lights, the faces of girls flash at you, you hear the tinkle of their laughter, you move through the fairy scene and pageantry as through a dream, thrilling strangely to its human joy, yet strangely not a part of it, passing on to your lonely camp in the woods below. Such scenes remain in the memory when much else that seemed more important to our lives has faded and vanished, and they come back to us out of the past with a wistful sweetness, ever more beautiful with the years.

The "ingenious Spaniard" quoted by Izaak Walton says that, "rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate, and fools to pass by without consideration." But we ourselves are not entirely convinced that the man who contemplates too habitually the inhabitants, truly contemplates the rivers. We have come upon the feet of many an angler, dangling over the bank, and lifted our eyes to a face whereon was writ less calm contemplation than annoyance at our disturbance of the water, or a sportsman's patient, stolid eagerness for game. We are far from persuaded that the average fisherman is a contemplative man at all, though it be heresy to harbor the doubt. Some of them are. So are many men who never fish. But, after all, to do anything well, requires concentration on your task, and we venture to affirm that nobody can cast a fly successfully in

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When you pass through a town, it is through the intimate life of the back yards you view it in its shirt sleeves... its

an alder thicket or under low-spreading maples or hemlocks whose mind is filled with philosophic reflections upon the destination of the stream or the beauty of the banks. Neither, we venture to affirm, is the patient watching of a cork on the water consistent with that breadth of vision, freedom of fancy and sensory alertness demanded by true contemplation. Contemplation of an inhabitant of the watery element means to the average angler one thing-what is the best way to haul him out? Contemplation of the river-which is the best pool for fish? No, the wise man who would truly contemplate rivers walks by their banks, if they will not float a canoe, or launches his craft upon them if they be deep enough, nor does he feel that he knows them until he has seen the world from their angle, from this curious viewpoint below the brink, and until he has followed them up into the hills whence they come and down toward the sea whither

they go. You do not know a river till you have become one with its current, a part of its life, winding with it through the meadows and fighting with it through the barriers of rock.

It is a curious fact which all sensitive observers must have noted that you get almost no "feel" of the contours of a country from the tonneau of an automobile. The sag of the springs, the extreme speed, the ease of the spurt up a hill, the rolling away of the landscape, the rush of the road to meet you, all combine to destroy that sense of local difference between one valley and the next. Of the delicate pleasures of road-side flowers and lovely vistas down logging roads and bird calls and wayfarers' greetings, of course, you get nothing at all. That is why some of us, to the extreme perplexity of the rest of us, take to our feet on the back roads.

But even more intimately than from the winding highway, travelled afoot, the coun

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houses faced the other way, their back roofs peeping at you over the trees, while paths come down as if to watch you pass.

try discloses its subtler aspects to him who journeys down its rivers by canoe. A road goes arbitrarily, often, where man has willed. A river finds by the first law of its nature the bottom land, it draws in to itself ultimately all roads and ways of man, and from its surface one looks perpetually up, instead of now up, now down, getting a constant, unchanging perspective on everything within the field of vision, which cannot err or falsify. Whose house is set the higher on a hill? From the river you shall have no doubt. Those blue huddled hills and intersecting valleys resolve themselves out of confusion into the assured familiarity of a map, to the river voyager. He has, on the very scale of nature itself, one of those raised maps so dear to the heart of boyhood, and he is sailing through the heart of it. Perpetually ahead lies the beckoning bend, or the long vista of river-valley opening between the hills. Perpetually to right and left are timbered

slopes or grassy uplands, now and again parting to proclaim a tributary, threaded with roads that seem ever to be coming down to speak to you in your canoe, to bring you news of the country side. When you pass through a town, it is through the intimate life of the back yards, not down its formal main street; you view it in its shirt sleeves, as it were, you catch it off its guard, its houses faced the other way, their back roofs peeping at you over the trees, while paths come down as if to watch you pass. Once more, the river view has the charm of strangeness, reveals the world. to you from a different angle.

"Poor Society! What hast thou done to be the aversion of us all?" This thou hast done. Thou hast cast us and kept us in moulds of convention, in starched collars and paved streets and stuffy houses (or, more often in flats!); in habits of vision and of speech; thou hast compelled us too often to forget our own souls in the bicker

of market-place or assembly. This thou hast done because it is a law of our nature to herd with our kind, to fight for things material, to create art and sky-scrapers and fine clothes and grand opera and high tariffs and slums and creeds and all sorts of jumbled wisdom and folly. But it is a law of our nature, too, sometimes to revolt, to throw ourselves back on the bosom of the Inanimate, to cry out not for art but the huddle of hills into the sunset and the song of a thrush, not for sky-scrapers but the ranks of the towering pines, not for paved streets and trolley cars, but the soft seduction of a little river.

A pipe, a box of matches, a hatchet, a little tent, a rod and line, blankets, a coffeepot and frying pan, a jug of water, a box of food, an old shirt, a canoe and the right companion to handle the bow-paddle, and in the ethereal river mists of a summer morning you launch your craft where the stream breaks out of its mountain cradle, and without need of map or compass give yourself gladly to its care until, perhaps, it joins the sea. It is a new world you shall see, through the magic lens of your lowered perspective, a world wherein many humble things are important and many great things shrink to insignificance. You shall pass through the haunts of men and care not for them. You shall camp in the fragrance of hemlocks and scatter the embers of your fire with regret. You shall make for the bend ahead with the joy of a discoverer, for the bend where the black

water steals mysteriously into the green, sun-flecked aisles of the forest, and your talk is hushed, your paddle muffled, till you creep in as silently as the moccasined Indian on the trail, as noiselessly as the water itself, or for the bend where the river, larger now, sweeps round a promontory covered with maples, all their shadowed symmetry backed by the blue sky, into the promise of sun-filled meadows and the languor of a summer day. Hour by hour the glide of the boat shall lull you, and when at twilight you climb stiff-legged out and rising upon the bank see the sky suddenly shrink, the world grow larger and familiar again, the grassy banks become once more not a bounding wall, but a small thing at your feet, the water shall still whisper a lullaby, running past you all the night.

And presently you shall go back to your Society-since there, after all, is probably your ultimate place with a new light, if ever so feeble, on what is important in it and what trivial, and the wistful memory of your nights beneath the stars and your days on the bosom of the kindly stream. Such is the true contemplation of rivers. It has little to do with angling, after all. It is born of the impulse of solitude and the instinct in man to wander from the hills to the sea, on the track of those primal forces which are greater than he, which grant him a new glimpse of beauty or awake an old romance, which stir in his imagination the vast and steadying images of his origin.

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