pilot boat, but at the time they entered the rapids, their boat was caught in a strong current bearing towards the south shore, and when they saw they were being swept away from the safe channel indicated by the pilot boat, were unable, on account of the intervening shoaly bed of the river, to pass across to that channel.
After going ashore, as I said before, the little party of women and children, the men remaining with the boat, climbed up the river bank, which at this place was not steep and only a few yards high, to a narrow plateau running parallel to the river. From this place we had a good view of the river, but could not see anything of the foundered boat or of those who had been in it. An Indian footpath ran along this plateau and we followed it down the river, very slowly, all the time searching the river with eager eyes. Now and then one would stop and point to the river and say, "I see some one's head there," and then we would all bunch up and look for the object pointed at. But it was only the top of a rock occasionally exposed by the ebbing of the waters. Several times we were deluded in this way. Mother and Aunt Cynthia were weeping. While we were yet walking along the river bank, some one came and told us that Parker, Doke, and brother Elisha were safe, but that McClellan and the two boys, Warren and Edward, could not be found. Then we understood that Elisha had saved himself by swimming. No doubt the fact that mother had always objected to the boys going swimming now flashed across her mind, and as the fact appeared that he had learned to swim by disobeying her orders, and had thereby saved his life, she felt a momentary pang of remorse, poor stricken soul! for she said, "I will never object to the boys going swimming any more."
Looking from where we were a person could get but a very imperfect knowledge of the tragic scene on the other side of the river, but those who escaped said that as their boat was being swept along down the rapids it was caught by one of those currents which, whirling in its course like a cyclone in the air, increased in velocity as the radius of the circle diminishes, until, with a roaring noise, it seems to sink, forming an open funnel-schaped vacuum in the water to the bottom of the river, often called a whirlpool. After being spun around
