Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/383

336 It was dark to blackness on a Saturday night as we paddled down to Easton. We had been told of a strong rapid just above the city, but we could not see it; we could only hear it, the roar doubled by the night and the imagination. We had run two or three small rifts in the dusk, and had escaped pretty well; and there was nothing for us but to venture again, in the dark, for nowhere could we find a place to land or leave our canoes.

Heavy as a sick animal, my poor little water-logged boat wallowed along. To strike now was doubly dangerous, for her weight would smash her, bow or beam. The other canoes went ahead. We had been instructed to keep "on the Jersey side of the island." When we entered the rapids, we only paddled for steerage-way. The men ahead kept shouting to me; but, when the rush of the fall came, I was too far to the right, and I brought up heavily on the very outermost stone of the reef.

The canoe was so firmly fixed, that I could have stayed there all night, by sitting quiet. I tried to push off, but could not. I tried to get out; but the stone was sloping, and offered no footing. The water, visible only for a few feet, like a flood of ink, ran with tremendous force on both sides of the stone. The other canoes were