Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/294



" river runs palpably down hill!" said my friend in the other boat, as our two canoes rounded a sweeping curve, and ran down an unbroken slope of half a mile.

So it did. Beautiful! That first air-borne sensation of a sheer slide was not beaten on the next hundred miles of river. The water was not three feet deep; clear as air—every pebble seen on the bottom, and none larger than your hand; and the whole wide river slipping and sliding like a great sheet of glass out of its frame! At the foot of the sloping water was a little rapid, our first on the Susquehanna, which is even more truly a river of rapids than a river of bends, though the latter is the meaning of its melodious Indian name.

We had stopped paddling on the "palpable hill," and we let the stream carry our canoes into