. 'Twas as though some unknown force
ashore had awakened, and was striving to tear the banks of the river in
two, so much did the portion of the landscape downstream seem to be
standing still while the portion level with us seemed to be receding in
the opposite direction, and thus causing a break to take place in the
middle of the picture.

And soon this movement, a movement agonisingly slow, deprived me of my
sense of being connected with the rest of the world, until, as the
whole receded, despair again gripped my heart and unnerved my limbs.
Roseate clouds were gliding across the sky and causing stray fragments
of the ice, which, seemingly, yearned to engulf me, to assume reflected
tints of a similar hue. Yes, it was as though the birth of spring had
reawakened the universe, and was causing it to stretch itself, and to
emit deep, hurried, broken pants that cracked its bones as the river,
embedded in the earth's stout framework, revivified the whole with
thick, turbulent, ebullient blood.

And this sense of littleness, of impotence amid the calm, assured
movement of the earth's vast bulk, weighed upon my soul, and evoked,
and momentarily fanned to flame in me, the shameless human question:
"What if I should stretch forth my hand and lay it upon the hill and
the banks of the river, and say, 'Halt until I come to you!'?"

Meanwhile the bells continued the mournful moaning of their resonant,
coppery notes; and that moaning led me to reflect that within two days
(on the night of the morrow) they would be pealing a joyous welcome to
the Resurrection Feast.

"Oh that all of us may live to hear that sound!" was my unspoken
thought.

Before my vision there kept quavering seven dark figures--figures
shuffling over the ice, and brandishing planks like oars. And,
wriggling like a lamprey in front of them was a little old fellow, an
old fellow resembling Saint Nicholas the Wonder-Worker, an old fellow
who kept crying softly, but authoritatively:

"Do not stare about you!"

And ever the river was growing rougher and ruder; ever its backbone was
beginning to puiver and flounder like a whale underfoot, with its
liquescent body of cold, grey, murky water bursting with increasing
frequency from its shell of ice, and lapping hungrily at our feet.

Yes, we were human beings traversing, as it were, a slender pole over a
bottomless abyss; and as we walked, the water's soft, cantabile splash
set me in mind of the depths below, of