nerve, sight, and muscle—a purely animal and instinctive alertness—for the moment of rushing excitement into which you are sweeping,—all this we experienced within ten minutes of leaving the gravel bed at Port Jervis, and while the teamster still shouted to us from the shore.
We were silent at first, and surprised. It took us some moments to realize that the surprise was delight. The river was not deep—three or four feet at most; but it ran down hill like a hunted hare. There was something quite new in it, too, which I concluded to be the long, wavy green weeds near the bottom, that floated straight with the current like a yacht's pennant in a gale, and by their swaying and glistening in the depths indicated the course and the extraordinary rapidity of the water.
"This is superb!" said one. The others echoed the word.
Almost before we knew, we were in the rush of the first rapid. We had not carefully followed the teamster's instructions to keep to the extreme left; and we had passed the narrow mouth of the channel. Before us ran an oblique bar of heavy stones, over which the river poured like a curtain. It ran clear across the river, and we found ourselves far into the closed angle. The water on the curtain to the left roared like a heavy surf,
