It was all very well to warn us, but what could WE do? You
can't back a raft upstream, you can't hurry it downstream, you can't
scatter out to one side when you haven't any room to speak of, you won't
take to the perpendicular cliffs on the other shore when they appear to
be blasting there, too. Your resources are limited, you see. There is
simply nothing for it but to watch and pray.

For some hours we had been making three and a half or four miles an hour
and we were still making that. We had been dancing right along until
those men began to shout; then for the next ten minutes it seemed to me
that I had never seen a raft go so slowly. When the first blast went
off we raised our sun-umbrellas and waited for the result. No harm
done; none of the stones fell in the water. Another blast followed, and
another and another. Some of the rubbish fell in the water just astern
of us.

We ran that whole battery of nine blasts in a row, and it was certainly
one of the most exciting and uncomfortable weeks I ever spent, either
aship or ashore. Of course we frequently manned the poles and shoved
earnestly for a second or so, but every time one of those spurts of dust
and debris shot aloft every man dropped his pole and looked up to get
the bearings of his share of it. It was very busy times along there for
a while. It appeared certain that we must perish, but even that was
not the bitterest thought; no, the abjectly unheroic nature of the
death--that was the sting--that and the bizarre wording of the resulting
obituary: "SHOT WITH A ROCK, ON A RAFT." There would be no poetry
written about it. None COULD be written about it. Example:

NOT by war's shock, or war's shaft,--SHOT, with a rock, on a raft.

No poet who valued his reputation would touch such a theme as that. I
should be distinguished as the only "distinguished dead" who went down
to the grave unsonneted, in 1878.

But we escaped, and I have never regretted it. The last blast was a
peculiarly strong one, and after the small rubbish was done raining
around us and we were just going to shake hands over our deliverance, a
later and larger stone came down amongst our little group of pedestrians
and wrecked an umbrella. It did no other harm, but we took to the water
just the same.

It seems that the heavy work in the quarries and the new railway
gradings is done mainly by Italians. That was a revelation. We have
the notion in our country that Italians never do heavy wor