FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   >>  
e encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it. V. So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. They perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered themselves to their choice up and down the shores. The weather commonly favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river when the weather was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulled their nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water- elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent fields. When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of the two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of the river on which all their days had been passed. They knew from indelible association every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. Were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if the State unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which would have made a solitude
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   >>  



Top keywords:

weather

 

earliest

 

favored

 

canals

 

robins

 
stream
 

opulent

 

fields

 

solitude

 
association

unstinted

 
meadow
 

indelible

 

passed

 

invited

 

plough

 

uninvited

 

welcomed

 

climbed

 

turned


sitting

 

changing

 

subjective

 

pilothouse

 

poured

 

furrows

 

concerned

 

question

 

rivermen

 

abandoning


public

 
fought
 

equally

 

German

 

prince

 
legislature
 

unnaturally

 

abandoned

 

railroads

 

foolishly


debating

 

Philippine

 

aspect

 

behoof

 

caprice

 

constant

 
dwelling
 

cumber

 

talked

 

voices