ess, and after
you had got them up, there was no way to keep them there except to
stand and hold them at arm's length. So we waddled across the river.
Now we have all read of shipwrecks, and the moral grandeur of
resignation and calmness which they have developed. We have read of
drowning, and the gorgeous intoxication of the process. But there is
neither grandeur nor gorgeousness in drowning in a tub. If you must
sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship,
in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as
the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at
their head, waving to each other calm farewells. I defy anybody to be
graceful or heroic in plumping down to the bottom of a city river amid
a jam of heated, hurried, panting, angry passengers, mountains of
trunks, carpet-bags, and indescribable plunder, and countless
stratifications of coagulated, glutinous, or pulverized mud. To the
credit of human nature it must be said, that the sufferers kept the
peace with each other, though vigorously denouncing the unknown author
of all their woes. After an age of suffocation and fusion, there came
a stir which was a relief because it was a stir. Nobody seemed to know
the cause or consequence, but everybody moved; so I moved, and bobbing,
fumbling, groping through Egyptian darkness, stumbling over the beams,
crawling under the boilers, creeping through the steam-pipes, scalping
ourselves against the funnels, we finally came out gasping into the
blessed daylight. "Here you are!" exclaimed cheerily the voice of
Halicarnassus, as I went winking and blinking in the unaccustomed
light. "I began to think I had lost my cane,"--he had given it to me
when he went to look up the trunks. "Why?" I asked faintly, not yet
fully recovered from my long incarceration. "It is so long since I saw
you, that I thought you must have fallen overboard," was his gratifying
reply. I was still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and
plunged the head of the cane, a dog's head it was, into his heart. His
watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the
fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther
end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at
midnight,--in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing,
flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and
as the people in the Pond were ma