evitably to regard it as a
Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret
life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent,
uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by
the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying
speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly
bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows
and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface
sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it
stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its
laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its
growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and
foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that
self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected
dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too
important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun
caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam
rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew
it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when
yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected
to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side
of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name;
leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and
wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was
to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries
came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in,
but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very
levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer.
Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn
comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and
incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long
twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that
against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much
dashing to and fro in order to g