k-out place." The opposite face of the
ridge went sheer down to the edge of the river, which, narrowed at this
point to less than half its usual width by the huge black cliffs that
walled it in, went rushing and foaming through a succession of furious
rapids for nearly a quarter of a mile, plunging at length in one great
leap over a precipice of nearly a hundred feet--a perfect Niagara in
miniature.

"I say, Tom, old fellow, didn't you tell us that you went canoeing along
this river every summer? You don't mean to say, surely, that you can
take a canoe over that water-fall?"

"Not _exactly_," laughed Tom; "that _would_ be a little too much of a
good thing. Whenever we come to anything of this sort, we make a
portage, as the French boatmen say--carry our canoes round by land, and
then launch them again below the fall. There's a snug little path just
round the corner, and as soon as we're through with lunch we'll just go
down and look about us."

Tom's "snug little path" proved to be very much like the stair of a
ruined light-house, and would have seemed to most people almost as bad
as going down the precipice itself. But Charlie and Harry Burton, though
new to the rocks of the Severn, had had plenty of climbing elsewhere,
while as for Tom himself, he could have scaled anything from a church
steeple to a telegraph pole.

The view was certainly well worth the trouble. Just at the break of the
fall the stream was divided by a small rocky islet crested with half a
dozen tall pines, the "Goat Island" of this toy Niagara. In the few rays
of sunlight that struggled down into the gloomy gorge the rushing river
with its sheets of glittering foam, and the bright green ferns and
mosses that clung to the dark cliffs around, and the shining arch of the
fall itself, and the rocks starting boldly up in mid-stream, tufted with
clustering leaves, made a splendid picture.

Close to the water's edge ran a kind of terrace, formed by the sliding
down of the softer parts of the cliff; and along this the three walked
till they came right abreast of the fall.

"Hollo!" cried Harry, suddenly, "didn't you say that nobody ever shot
these rapids? Why, there's a fellow trying it now!"

There, sure enough, as he pointed up the stream, appeared a canoe with a
single figure in it, shooting down the river like an arrow, and already
close upon the edge of the rapids.

"Good gracious!" cried Tom, with a look of horror, "it's some fellow
being sw