journey to end. We had been
several months upon the river--several months in travelling one hundred
miles! One can not always go lazing on, even in a houseboat; even upon
an ancient waterway leading through Colonial-land.

The old river may carry you to the beginning-place of your country; it
may bear you on to the doors of famous colonial homes, full of old-time
charm and traditional courtesy. But if so, then all the more need for
falls and rapids to put a reasonable end to your houseboat voyage.

We came about the bend in the stream and, at sight of the city before
us, were reminded of the keen prevision of its colonial founder. When
Colonel William Byrd, that sagacious exquisite of Westover, came up the
river one day in 1733 to this part of his almost boundless estate, and
laid the foundations of Richmond here in the wilderness beside the
Falls of the James, he foresaw that he was founding a great city. A
"city in the air" he called it, and his dream came true. Its
realization in steeples and spires and chimneys and roof-lines opened
before us now upon the slopes and the summits of the river hills.

Soon we were skirting the city's water front. We passed piers and
factories and many boats. We went from the pure air of the open river
into the tainted breath of the town. Among many odours there came to be
chiefly one--that of tobacco from the great factories.

And that brought to mind a strange fact. In all our journey up the
river, we had not seen a leaf of tobacco nor had we seen a place where
it was grown. Tobacco, upon which civilization along the James had been
built; that had once covered with its broad leaves almost every
cultivated acre along the stream; that had made the greatness of every
plantation home we had visited--and now unknown among the products of
the fertile river banks!

At last Gadabout was at the foot of the falls and rapids. Like those
first exploring colonists we found that here "the water falleth so
rudely, and with such a violence, as not any boat can possibly passe."

[Illustration: THE VOYAGE ENDED. GADABOUT IN WINTER QUARTERS.]

Of course there was a temptation to do with our boat as the colonists
once proposed to do with theirs--take her to pieces and then put her
together again above the falls, and so sail on up the old waterway to
the South Sea and to the Indies. But the exploring spirit of the race
is not what it used to be, and we simply ran Gadabout into a slip
beside the dis