e a porcupine's quills, at every conceivable
angle. The obstructing logs in the throat of the fall bore the
pressure rather lengthwise than across the fibre. These sticks were of
yellow spruce, fifty feet long, and fully three feet through. Such
logs, when green, will bear an enormous strain. From the way the
exposed ends sprang we knew they were buckling like steel rods, yet
they held pertinaciously.

The river above was covered with logs. Scores came shooting down
every minute, striking into the jam like arrows. The most of these
stuck in it. Some few went clean over it, or through it, for the
first ten minutes, into the hole below. Logs would glance from the
slippery black rocks and go a hundred feet clear of the water, such
was the strength of the rapid. I saw sticks of free pine--where they
struck the rocks one half on--go in halves from end to end like
split-beans--logs forty and fifty feet long; yet the owners never
cease to wonder how the lumber gets so badly "broomed up;" for the
ends of the logs resemble nothing so much as a paint-brush.

The warps were brought, and Villate called for volunteers to go down,
or rather be let down, the ledges and prize off the shore ends of the
jammed logs with "peevies." There were plenty of bold fellows; but
every man hesitated. Murmurs of "_certaine mort_," "_sur mort_,"
"_porte du tombeau_," "_porte d'enfer_," arose and were repeated.

"It's a hard world, but I wants to tarry in it a spell longer, boss!"
said one grizzled old Yankee from the Maine rivers, with a sage shake
of his long head. We all knew that when the jam started it would go
through like an avalanche. Whoever was down there would have to go
with it--into the glut-hole.

In an hour the jam had grown enormously. For a hundred rods up the
rapid the channel was full of lumber, "churning" and battering itself.
The mass had swayed off to the west bank and was piling up against the
ledges on the opposite side. The mighty pressure of the torrent kept
rolling the logs, one over the other, till the top of the pile was in
places thirty or forty feet out of the water. The bottom logs were
wedged into the bed of the stream. The flood, thus dammed and held
back, rose higher and higher, rushing through and among the mass with
a strange hollow roar which changed the note of the fall. Where it
hung in the throat of the pitch, the mass kept rising and falling with
the peculiar rhythmic motion of the water. We expected each