Agnes lifted her head in wondering admiration.

"You can speak of it calmly!" she wondered, "and you went through it,
while it gives me a chill of fear even to think about it! Did you--come
to shore before you entered the canyon?"

"No; I went through it from end to end. I don't know how far the river
carried me in that box. It seemed miles. But the canyon is only two miles
long, they say. The box floated upright mainly, being pretty well
balanced by my weight in the bottom, but at times it was submerged and
caught against rocks, where the current held it and the water poured in
until I thought I should be drowned that way.

"I was working to break the boards off the top, and did get one off,
when the whole thing went to pieces against a rock. I was rolled and
beaten and smashed about a good bit just then. Arms were useless. The
current was so powerful that I couldn't make a swimming-stroke. My chief
recollection of those few troubled moments is of my arms being stretched
out above my head, as if they were roped there with the weight of my
body swinging on them. I supposed that was my finish."

"But you went through!" she whispered, touching him softly on the arm as
if to recall him from the memory of that despairing time.

"I came up against a rock like a dead fish," said he, "my head above
water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping
down. That saved me, for I hadn't strength to catch hold. The pressure
almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that
helped some.

"There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock,
for I don't know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a
poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds,
fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But
I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could
kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the
chill of that place if it hadn't been that the rock was a big one, big
enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was
able.

"I don't know how far along the canyon I was, or how long it was after
day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to
me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway
of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It
seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have da