Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/471

412 drop into the open dugout of the "swamper," out of which they wriggle without delay. But the thought of a five-foot venomous snake dropping into a fourteen-foot canoe, with decks forward and aft, under which he would be sure to dart, and out of which there was no escape except by returning to the centre of the boat, was a dismal imagining. To make sure of no such visitor, I kept firing now and then into the canes ahead.

The water in the Jericho Canal runs into the lake; but at one-third its length the stream turns and runs the other way, emptying into the Nansemond river.

This line where the watershed divides is unquestionably the highest portion of the swamp. It has not been surveyed; but calculating the rise from the Feeder to the northwest corner of the lake to be two feet, and three feet for the old lock at the opening of the Jericho Canal, I predict that the extreme height of the swamp will be from twenty-eight to thirty feet above tide water.

The condition of the wholly abandoned "Washington's Ditch" is even more forbidding than that of the Jericho Canal. The heavy trees are crowding its banks and leaning into it; the bamboos meet across it for long distances. It is, I think, the most sombre and evil-looking waterway on the