amounted to anything, except to give swiftness and breadth and mass to that tremendous flood tide pouring so swiftly out of empires into—into its own!
Looking about him in wonderment Murdong rested at his oars. Finally he housed them, and sat back to let Old Mississip' do the work! Heretofore he had rowed and the river had pulled him sixty to ninety miles a day. Now he let the ponderous torrent carry him at its own will, and he enjoyed the sensation.
He was conscious that his thoughts filled him with satisfaction, and he looked around him, wishing that he had a pencil and paper, or typewriter and ribbons—something with which to record those precious if fleeting ideas, which he mistook for his own, but which were, in fact, mere reflections of the river which has fooled so many a wise man into fancying he was responsible.
Thus suddenly had the river ironed out the wrinkles in G. Alexander Murdong's mind and soul, and made him a very much finer person to meet and know. He was humbled now; he saw certain things in better perspective; his most important affairs couldn't amount to as much as a whoop in Hades, when he saw himself afloat in a mile-wide tide, bound down a bend in which the great Ohio River was but a streak of green skirting along under the eastern bank.
Artists, photographers, rich men, poor men, beggars,
