nd the child's
gargling cry is strangled by the water whitened by his mad clawings. I
can see his head come up, his eyes bulging, and his face distorted with
the awful fear that is ours by the inheritance of ages. He will sink and
come up again, not three times, but a hundred times. Eventually he will
win safe to shore, panting and trembling, his little heart knocking
against his ribs, it is true, but lord of the water from that time
forth. It is a very fine method, yes... but... well, if it was my boy I
had just as lief he tarried with the little white monkeys at the river's
edge. Let him squeal and crouch and splash and learn how to half drown
the other fellow by shooting water at him with the heel of his hand.
Let him alone. He will be watching the others swim. He will edge out a
little farther and kick up his heels while with his hands he holds on
the ground. He will edge out a little farther still and try to keep his
feet on the bottom and swim with his hands. Be patient in his attempt to
combine the two methods of travel. He is not the only one that fears to
be one thing or the other, and regards a mixture of both as the safest
way to get along.

No, I cannot say that I wholly approve of the sudden method of learning
to swim. It has the advantange of lumping all the scares of a lifetime
into one and having it over with, and yet I don't suppose the scare of
being thrown into the water by one's daddy is really greater than being
ducked in mid-stream by some hulking, cackle-voiced big boy. It seems
greater though, I suppose, because a fellow cannot very well relieve
his feelings by throwing stones at his daddy and bawling: "Goldarn you
anyhow, you--you big stuff! I'll get hunk with you, now you see if I
don't!" Here would be just the place to make the little boy tie knots
in the big boy's shirt-sleeves, soak the knots in water, and pound them
between stones. But that is kind of common, I think. They told about it
at the swimming-hole above the dam, but nobody was mean enough to do it.
Maybe they did it down at the Copperas Banks below town. The boys from
across the tracks went there, a race apart, whom we feared, and who
hated us, if the legend chalked up on the fences "DAMB THE PRODESTANCE,"
meant anything.

Under the slow method of learning to swim one had leisure to observe the
different fashions--dog-fashion and cow-fashion, steamboat-fashion,
and such. The little kids and beginners swam dog-fashion, which on th