cheerfully have renounced every claim to glory that could
possibly be acquired by the feat, to have been safe again on shore.
He heard the roar of the water, thundering, as it might be, behind a
screen, but becoming more and more distinct, louder and louder, and
before him he saw its line cutting the forest below, along which
the green and angry element seemed stretched and shining, as if the
particles were about to lose their principle of cohesion.

"Down with your helm, down with your helm, man!" he exclaimed, unable
any longer to suppress his anxiety, as the canoe glided towards the edge
of the fall.

"Ay, ay, down it is sure enough," answered Pathfinder, looking behind
him for a single instant, with his silent, joyous laugh,--"down we go,
of a sartinty! Heave her starn up, boy; farther up with her starn!"

The rest was like the passage of the viewless wind. Eau-douce gave the
required sweep with his paddle, the canoe glanced into the channel, and
for a few seconds it seemed to Cap that he was tossing in a caldron. He
felt the bow of the canoe tip, saw the raging, foaming water careering
madly by his side, was sensible that the light fabric in which he
floated was tossed about like an egg-shell, and then, not less to his
great joy than to his surprise, he discovered that it was gliding across
the basin of still water below the fall, under the steady impulse of
Jasper's paddle.

The Pathfinder continued to laugh; but he arose from his knees, and,
searching for a tin pot and a horn spoon, he began deliberately to
measure the water that had been taken in the passage.

"Fourteen spoonfuls, Eau-douce; fourteen fairly measured spoonfuls. I
have, you must acknowledge, known you to go down with only ten."

"Master Cap leaned so hard up stream," returned Jasper seriously, "that
I had difficulty in trimming the canoe."

"It may be so; no doubt it _was_ so, since you say it; but I have known
you go over with only ten."

Cap now gave a tremendous hem, felt for his queue as if to ascertain its
safety, and then looked back in order to examine the danger he had
gone through. His safety is easily explained. Most of the river fell
perpendicularly ten or twelve feet; but near its centre the force of the
current had so far worn away the rock as to permit the water to shoot
through a narrow passage, at an angle of about forty or forty five
degrees. Down this ticklish descent the canoe had glanced, amid
fragments of broken rock,