402 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
which way the river ran. The voluble lad with feet nervously dangling from the edge of the lumber-pile answered promptly, " Huh ! it don't run nowhere ; it stays right there." His nearest companion, prone on stomach with chin in hands and heels wagging slowly in the air, answered more deliberately, " In high water it runs all over here." The chubby boy lying on his back with hat pulled over his eyes chimed in with the confidence of experience, " It runs agin the boat ; jist you try it and see." Next the pallid youngster crouching on the farther corner of the corded boards piped up, " My father says it runs to St Louis," only to be suppressed by the ragged, red-haired urchin lying in a heap on the center of the pile with the ultimatum: "Hey? Well my dad says it runs right up yonder past Eagle Point to St Paul ; and I reckon he knows ! " Then the scientific inquiry was brought to a close by the more pertinent and important query in return, *' Have ye ary white alleys?" But the lesson was not lost ; I had learned how hard it is to find which way the current runs ; I had learned, too, the worthlessness of the opinions of idlers.
Later I looked down on the stream of human experience with interest no less than that excited by the first sight of the Mississippi ; I scanned the waves and eddies raised on the noble river by the breezes of conflicting opinion, and strove to separate them from the steady current below; and I inquired of the loiterers on the banks of this stream, no less hopefully than of the loafers on the long-ago lumber-pile on the Mississippi, as to the trend of the current. Not always have my guides agreed. When I asked of the past and future career of our planet, some held it to be slowly approaching the sun with a certainty of ulti- mate absorption in the fiery mass, while others considered it a slowly refrigerating body bound to lose its vitality neath a mantle of ice ; I do not know which is right, and half suspect both guides to lack the experience needed to decide. When I first in- quired the course of vegetal and animal life, I was met by the
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