know why the sight of this afflicted soul did not slay my boy on
the spot, he was so afraid of him; but the crazy man never really hurt
any one, though the boys followed and mocked him as soon as he got by.

The boys knew little or nothing of the river south of the bridge, and
frequented mainly that mile-long stretch of it between the bridge and
the dam, beyond which there was practically nothing for many years;
afterwards they came to know that this strange region was inhabited.
Just above the bridge the Hydraulic emptied into the river with a
heart-shaking plunge over an immense mill-wheel; and there was a cluster
of mills at this point, which were useful in accumulating the waters
into fishing-holes before they rushed through the gates upon the wheel.
The boys used to play inside the big mill-wheel before the water was
let into the Hydraulic, and my boy caught his first fish in the pool
below the wheel. The mills had some secondary use in making flour and
the like, but this could not concern a small boy. They were as simply a
part of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hung
over the river from a point near by, and which seemed to have always an
oriole singing in it. All along there the banks were rather steep, and
to him they looked very high. The blue clay that formed them was full of
springs, which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose in
glassy falls upon their flutter-mills. As with everything that boys do,
these mills were mostly failures; the pins which supported the wheels
were always giving way; and though there were instances of boys who
started their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away at
noon when they came out of school, none ever carried his enterprise so
far as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-tree
by the shore, as they all meant to do. They met such disappointments
with dauntless cheerfulness, and lightly turned from some bursting
bubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored.
The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton, but with drift
which the water had made porous, and which they called smoke-wood. They
made cigars for their own use out of it, and it seemed to them that it
might be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute for
tobacco; but they never got any of it into the market, not even the
market of that world where the currency was pins.

The river had its own climate