pring, tender and elusive, yet keenly penetrating. If gems had
perfumes, just so might the opal smell.

Besides the fragrance and the faint chill, the air carried an April
music, a confusion of delicate sounds that seemed striving to weave a
tissue of light melody over the steady, muffled murmur of the freshet.
In this melody the ear could differentiate certain notes,--the hum of
bees and flies in the willow bloom, the staccato _chirr_, _chirr_ of the
blackbirds in the elm-tops, the vibrant yet liquid _kong-kla-lee_ of the
redwings in the alders, the intermittent ecstasy of a stray
song-sparrow, the occasional long flute-call of a yellowhammer across
the flood, and, once in awhile, a sudden clamour of crows, a jangle of
irrelevant, broken chords. From time to time, as if at points in a great
rhythm too wide for the ear to grasp, all these sounds would cease for a
second or two, leaving the murmur of the flood strangely conspicuous.

The colours of the world of freshet were as delicately thrilling as its
scents and sounds. The veiled blue pallor of the sky and the milky,
blue-gray pallor of the water served as neutral background to
innumerable thin washes and stains of tint. Over the alders a bloom of
lavender and faint russet, over the willows a lacing of pale yellow,
over the maples a veiling of rose-pink, over the open patches on the
uplands a mist that hinted of green, and over the further hills of the
forest, broad, smoky smudges of indigo. Here and there, just above the
reach of the freshet, a pine or spruce interrupted the picture
emphatically with an intrusion of firm green-black.

Into this opalescent scene, some days before the freshet reached its
height, the logs began to come down. In the upper country every
tributary stream was pouring them out in shoals,--heavy, blind, butting,
and blundering shoals,--to be carried by the great river down to the
booms and saws above its mouth. Some, caught in eddies, were thrust
aside up the bank to lie and slowly rot among the living trees. But
most, darting and wallowing through mad rapids, or shooting falls, or
whirling and circling dully down the more tranquil reaches of the tide,
made shift to accomplish their voyage. They would blacken the broad
river for acres at a time; and then again straggle along singly, or by
twos and threes. It was a good run of logs and the scattered dwellers
along the river forgave the unusual excesses of the freshet, because to
them it was