water. A few steps further and he stood for the first time on the
bank of the Mississippi.

The youth felt those emotions which must come to every one when he
emerges from a vast forest at night and pauses beside one of the
grandest streams of the globe. At that day its real source was
unknown, but Jack, who was unusually well informed for one of his
years, was aware that it rose somewhere among the snowy mountains
and unexplored regions far to the northward, and that, after its
winding course of hundreds of leagues, during which it received the
volume of many rivers, enormous in themselves, it debouched into the
tropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

The reflection of the turbid current showed that it was flowing
swiftly. The dark line of the forest on the other shore appeared
like a solid wall of blackness, while to the north and south the
view ended in the same impenetrable gloom.

Impressed and awed by the scene, the lad saw something which at
first startled him by its resemblance to a man, standing in the
river, with his feet braced against the bottom and his head and
shoulders above the surface. The current seemed to rush against his
bared breast, from which it was cast back and aside, as though flung
off by a granite rock. Then the head bowed forward, as if the
strong man sought to bathe his brain in the cooling waters, that he
might be refreshed against the next shock.

A minute's scrutiny was enough to show Jack that the object was a
tree, which, rolling into the river at some point, perhaps hundreds
of miles above, had grown weary of its journey, and, plunging its