the masther. I'll lave it to the ship to choose for hersilf." Saying
this he relaxed his hold upon the steering oar, and permitted the
galatea to drift with the current.

Sure enough, the little craft inclined towards the branch that appeared
the broader one; and in ten minutes' time had made such way that the
other opening was no longer visible from her decks. The steersman,
confident of being on the right course, gave himself no further
uneasiness; but, once more renewing his hold upon the steering oar,
guided the galatea in the middle of the channel.

Notwithstanding all absence of suspicion as to having gone astray, he
could not help noticing that the banks on each side appeared to be
singularly irregular, as if here and there indented by deep bays, or
reaches of water. Some of these opened out vistas of shining surface,
apparently illimitable, while the dark patches that separated them
looked more like clumps of trees half submerged under water, than
stretches of solid earth.

As the galatea continued her course, this puzzling phenomenon ceased to
be a conjecture; Tipperary Tom saw that he was no longer steering down a
river between two boundary banks, but on a broad expanse of water,
stretching as far as eye could reach, with no other boundary than that
afforded by a _flooded forest_.

There was nothing in all this to excite alarm,--at least in the mind of
Tipperary Tom. The Mundurucu, had he been awake, might have shown some
uneasiness at the situation. But the Indian was asleep,--perhaps
dreaming of some Mura enemy,--whose head he would have been happy to
embalm.

Tom simply supposed himself to be in some part of the Solimoes, flooded
beyond its banks, as he had seen it in more places than one. With this
confidence, he stuck faithfully to his steering oar, and allowed the
galatea to glide on. It was only when the reach of water--upon which the
craft was drifting--began to narrow, or rather after it had narrowed to
a surprising degree, that the steersman began to suspect himself of
having taken the wrong course.

His suspicions became stronger, at length terminating in a conviction
that such was the truth, when the galatea arrived at a part where less
than a cable's length lay between her beam-ends and the bushes that
stood out of the water on both sides of her. Too surely had he strayed
from the "mane sthrame." The craft that carried him could no longer be
in the channel of the mighty Solimoes!

The s