Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/384

Rh out of hearing; and the night was as black as the inside of a cave, with the bright, electric lights of the city, a quarter of a mile away, set upon what seemed high cliffs above the river.

However it was to be done, I must get out, and ease the canoe off the rock. This was one of the minutes in which the disgusted canoeman resolves to give up the sport. If I pushed her over, down stream, I could never hold her to get in: she must be pulled back, and then pushed round the stone. Slowly and cautiously, I got out, and into the water behind the stone, which was almost waist-deep. When the canoe was pulled back, I got in, with some trouble; and a few minutes later joined the others at the end of the rift.

Then began a hunt for a landing. We found that, in the city of Easton, there is not a single landing-place where we could put up our boats for the night. At last we were directed to a place where boats were kept on the bank, on the Jersey side; and there we found an obliging and interesting man named John Horn (the boys called him "Tippy" Horn), who allowed us to carry the canoes up on his rocks, and who stored our baggage, and then rowed us across to Easton.

He was an old river-man; and he said that he had never seen the water so low as it was then. He was a type of the calm, polite, and intelligent