st, and I was glad. It was a mistake, however, to be glad just
then. It was too soon. The wind had kicked up a good deal of water, and
though our canoes were lighter than when we started, I did not consider
them suited to such a sea. They pitched about and leaped up into the
air, one minute with the bow entirely out of water, and the next with
it half-buried in the billow ahead. Every other second a big wave ran on
a level with the gunwale, and crested its neck and looked over and
hissed, and sometimes it spilled in upon us. It would not take much of
that kind of freight to make a cargo, and anything like an accident in
that wide, gray billowy place was not a nice thing to contemplate. A
loaded canoe would go down like a bullet. No one clad as we were could
swim more than a boat's length in that sea.

As we got farther on shore the waves got worse. If somebody had just
suggested it I should have been willing to turn around and make back for
the Shelburne. Nobody suggested it, and we went on. It seemed to me
those far, dim shores through the mist, five miles or more away, would
never get any closer. I grew tired, too, and my arms ached, but I could
not stop paddling. I was filled with the idea that if I ever stopped
that eternal dabbing at the water, my end of the canoe would never ride
the next billow. Del reflected aloud, now and then, that we had made a
mistake to come out on such a day. When I looked over at the other canoe
and saw it on the top of a big wave with both ends sticking out in the
air, and then saw it go down in a trough of black, ugly water, I
realized that Del was right. I knew our canoe was doing just such
dangerous things as that, and I would have given any reasonable sum for
an adequate life preserver, or even a handy pine plank--for anything,
in fact, that was rather more certain to stay on top of the water than
this billow-bobbing, birch-bark peanut shell of a canoe.

I suppose I became unduly happy, therefore, when at last we entered the
mouth of the Liverpool. I was so glad that I grew gay, and when we
started up the rapids I gave Del a good lift here and there by pushing
back against the rocks with my paddle, throwing my whole weight on it
sometimes, to send the canoe up in style. It is always unwise for me to
have a gay reaction like that, especially on Friday, which is my unlucky
day. Something is so liable to happen. We were going up a particularly
steep piece of water when I got my paddle a