r and the ice had gone out,
the spring freshets and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement
of the year. The channel was never the same for two successive
seasons. Every spring the swollen stream undermined a bluff to the
east, or bit out a few acres of corn field to the west and whirled
the soil away to deposit it in spumy mud banks somewhere else. When
the water fell low in midsummer, new sand-bars were thus exposed to
dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes these were banked so
firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to unseat them; the
little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the yellow froth,
broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and with their
mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them against the
batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood soon
glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that, even
on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
road, trembled along the face of the water.

It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green,
that we built our watch-fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow
wands, but on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added
that spring; a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with
ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and
fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured. We
had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although we
often swam out to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch-fire of the year, and there were reasons why
I should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the
other boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown
High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first
country school in the Norwegian district. I was already homesick at
the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always played; of
leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that was all
windmills and corn fields and big pastures; where there was nothing
wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands, and no
chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were
friends mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler
boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They