with infinite endearments and smiles, making the world very sparkling and musical there. By and by they fall to romping, and, to avoid one of their turbulent frolics, Cancut landed us, as he supposed, on the mainland, to lighten the canoe. Just as he was sliding away down-stream, we discovered that he had left us upon an island in the midst of frantic, impassable rapids. “Stop, stop, John Gilpin!” and luckily he did stop, otherwise he would have gone on to tide-water, ever thinking that we were before him, while we, with our forest appetites, would have been glaring hungrily at each other, or perhaps drawing lots for a cannibal doom. Once again, as we were shooting a long rapid, a table-top rock caught us in mid-current. We were wrecked. It was critical. The waves swayed us perilously this way and that. Birch would be full of water, or overturned, in a moment. Small chance for a swimmer in such maelstroms! All this we saw, but had no time to shudder at. Aided by the urgent stream, we carefully and delicately — for a coarse movement would have been death — wormed our boat off the rock, and went fleeting through a labyrinth of new perils, onward, with a wild exhilaration, like galloping through prairie on fire. Of all the high distinctive national pleasures of America, chasing buffalo, stump-speaking, and the like, there is none so intense as shooting rapids in a birch. Whenever I recall our career down the Penobscot, a longing comes over me to repeat it.
