Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/353

310 it continued intermittently quite down to Trenton, where the last rapid on the Delaware pitches the canoeman into tidal water. The bank resembled molten metal that had hardened. It was almost black, a clean, smooth stone, with round puff-holes in it, no vegetation whatever on the steep slope of, say, twenty feet from the water's edge, above which rose a wooded hill, almost a mountain. The metallic bank ended abruptly in the stream, and the deep current alongside ran with astonishing swiftness.

I realized in brief time that up to that day I had not known rapid water, continued in a long stream. The Susquehanna rapids are short and sharp descents, followed by slow and gentle reaches, some of which are miles in length. The Connecticut, in a memory of six years' distance, spreads out like a lake, with here and there a log moving alongshore, showing that there actually is a current. The Merrimack was remembered as a very millpond, except on the short descent of Miller's Falls, near Haverhill, and in the powerful tidal rush under Deer Island Chain-bridge at Newburyport; while many lesser streams were quite forgotten in presence of this grand artery which carried us onward almost as fast as we could paddle on slower rivers.

I have given too much space to our first rapid