de-lines held, and then start down. Whereupon it was: "Cut hawsers,
everybody!" and drop these pulley-blocks and tackle-fixings, useless
now, and let her go, let her go, since there is no stopping her, and
Heaven help the boys on board! Then, amid shouts of dismay, the big boat
_Nassif-Kheir_ plunged forward to her destruction, while the
mathematical gentlemen stared in horror--then stared in amazement. For
look! She keeps to the channel! She is running true! Wonder of wonders,
she is shooting the rapids, shooting the greatest cataract of the Nile,
where boats of her tonnage never passed before!

The _Nassif-Kheir_ was saved, and every man aboard her, and every box of
stores. She was saved by an humble Canadian pilot, who had never studied
trigonometry, but who stepped to the wheel when he saw the peril, and
steered her down those furious rapids as he had steered other boats down
other rapids on the old St. Lawrence. After that, when the expedition
found itself in trouble in the upper cataracts, say those of Tangoor or
Akashe or Ambigole or Dal, and when the Royal Engineers had drawn up
some neat plan with compasses and squares for doing a certain thing with
a boat, and had proved by the books that it _could_ be done, and agreed
that it should be done forthwith, then some one would usually say, just
at the last, as by an afterthought:

"I suppose we might as well have in one of those voyageur chaps, just to
see what _he_ thinks of it!"

And they usually had him in.

THE BRIDGE-BUILDER

I

IN WHICH WE VISIT A PLACE OF UNUSUAL FEARS AND PERILS

AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one
whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months
of the century, I found myself under a growing impression that here at
last was a business with not only danger in it, but fear of danger.
Divers and steeple-climbers I had seen who pronounced their work
perfectly safe (though I knew better), and balloonists of the same mind
about perils of the air; there were none, they declared, despite a list
of deaths to prove the contrary. And so on with others. But here on the
bridge were men who showed by little things, and sometimes admitted,
that they were _afraid_ of the black-ribbed monster. And it seemed to me
that these were men with the best kind of grit in them, for although
they were afraid of the bridge, they were not afraid of their fear, and
they stuck to their job week