Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/164

 tamely enough over a small dam; Niagara's prestige is nowhere menaced.

There is a kind of emergency fleet corporation doing a bustling traffic at the little plank landing stage. The chief navigating officer was toting a roll of bills larger than I can face with comfort. From him one hires a vessel of sorts, propelled by bright red oars, and then one sets forth up the stream. Most of the voyagers are content after passing the island, for the current, though sluggish, is persistent. But it is well to keep on. Neshaminy shows her rarest charms to those who woo her stoutly. Above the island there is a long strip of thick woodland on both banks. The treetops, rising steeply into the bright air, keep tossing and trembling in the wind, but the stream itself is entirely still. Along the bank, where the great bleached trunks climb out of the water, there hangs the peculiar moist, earthy, pungent smell of a river that runs among woods. Every freshwater bather must know that smell. It has in it a dim taint as of decay, a sense of rotting vegetation. Yet it is a clean odor and a cool one. It is a smell particularly dear to me, for it recalls to my eager nostril the exact scent of the old bathing place on the Cherwell at Oxford, quaintly known as Parson's Pleasure. How vividly I remember that moist, cool corner of turf, the afternoon sunlight stabbing it with slanting arrows of gold, the enigmatic old Walt Whitman (called Cox) handing