e charm for me. I seized the
spark-lever, intending to shut down. Instead, I threw it wide open. With
the resulting leap of the craft, all the gray went out of me.

I grasped the rudder ropes and aimed at a point where the sinuous
current sucked through a passage in the rocks like a lean flame through
a windy flue. Did you ever hear music that made you see purple? It was
that sort of purple I saw (or did I hear it like music?) when we plunged
under full speed into the first suck of the rapids. We seemed a
conscious arrow hurled through a gray, writhing world, the light of
which was noise. And then, suddenly, the quiet, golden morning flashed
back; and we were ripping the placid waters of a lake.

The Kid broke out into boisterous laughter that irritated me strangely:
"Where the devil do you suppose our life-preservers are?" he bawled.
"They're clear down under all the cargo!"

A world of wonderful beauty was forging past us. In the golden calm, the
scintillant sheet of water seemed to be rushing backward, splitting
itself over the prow, like a fabric woven of gold and silver drawn
rapidly against a keen stationary blade.

The sheer cliffs had fallen away into pine-clad slopes, and vari-colored
rocks flung notes of scarlet and gold through the sombre green of the
pines--like the riotous treble cries of an organ pricking the sullen
murmur of the bass. So still were the clean waters that we seemed midway
between two skies.

We skirted the base of a conical rock that towered three hundred feet
above us--a Titan sentinel. It was the famous Sentinel Rock of the old
steamboat days. I shut the engine down to quarter speed, for somehow
from the dizzy summit a sad dream fell upon me and bade me linger.

I stared down into the cold crystal waters at the base of the rock.
Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear,
black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung
there. I remembered an old spring I used to haunt when I was just old
enough to be awed by the fact of life and frightened at the possibility
of death. Just such mosses grew in the depths of that spring. I used to
stare into it for hours.

It fascinated me in a terrible way. I thought Death looked like that.
Even now I am afraid I could not swim long in clear waters with those
fearful colors under me. I am sure they found Ophelia floating like a
ghastly lily in such a place.

Filled with a shadow of the old childish d