nothing but an atom. What odds,
after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray
of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing
emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal
of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the
slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at
hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and
transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;
there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all
along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a
wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it
certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made
her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral
mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,
swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a
spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking
down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch
between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside
sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten
thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone
overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness
of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall
and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and
rapid-running river.

What was there now to do? To go back,--to go back,--not if she were torn
by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of
creation. God had said to her,--"Let there be light." How could she,
then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,--it might be weeks
before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,--she would be seized as
a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But
with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she
sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver
leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their
crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the
bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again
about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its
luminous, steady arch, se