whipped in around the abutment of the bridge to reach me! I looked
out well satisfied upon the foaming water, upon the wet, unpainted
houses and barns of the Shavertowners, and upon the trees,

"Caught and cuffed by the gale."

Another traveler--the spotted-winged nighthawk--was also roughly
used by the storm. He faced it bravely, and beat and beat, but was
unable to stem it, or even hold his own; gradually he drifted back,
till he was lost to sight in the wet obscurity. The water in the
river rose an inch while I waited, about three quarters of an hour.
Only one man, I reckon, saw me in Shavertown, and he came and
gossiped with me from the bank above when the storm had abated.

The second night I stopped at the sign of the elm-tree. The woods
were too wet, and I concluded to make my boat my bed. A superb elm,
on a smooth grassy plain a few feet from the water's edge, looked
hospitable in the twilight, and I drew my boat up beneath it. I
hung my clothes on the jagged edges of its rough bark, and went to
bed with the moon, "in her third quarter," peeping under the
branches upon me. I had been reading Stevenson's amusing "Travels
with a Donkey," and the lines he pretends to quote from an old play
kept running in my head:--

'The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was sweet, the water ran;
No need was there for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God's green caravanserai."