eral blemishes in it;
for instance, the wagon is not traveling as fast as the
horse is. This is wrong. Again, the person trying to get
out of the way is too small; he is out of perspective,
as we say. The two upper lines are not the horse's back,
they are the reigns; there seems to be a wheel missing
--this would be corrected in a finished Work, of course.
This thing flying out behind is not a flag, it is a curtain.
That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn't get
enough distance on it. I do not remember, now, what that
thing is that is in front of the man who is running,
but I think it is a haystack or a woman. This study
was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not
take any medal; they do not give medals for studies.
[Figure 3]

We discharged the carriage at the bridge. The river was
full of logs--long, slender, barkless pine logs--and we
leaned on the rails of the bridge, and watched the men put
them together into rafts. These rafts were of a shape
and construction to suit the crookedness and extreme
narrowness of the Neckar. They were from fifty to one
hundred yards long, and they gradually tapered from a
nine-log breadth at their sterns, to a three-log breadth
at their bow-ends. The main part of the steering is done
at the bow, with a pole; the three-log breadth there
furnishes room for only the steersman, for these little logs
are not larger around than an average young lady's waist.
The connections of the several sections of the raft are
slack and pliant, so that the raft may be readily bent
into any sort of curve required by the shape of the river.

The Neckar is in many places so narrow that a person
can throw a dog across it, if he has one; when it is
also sharply curved in such places, the raftsman has
to do some pretty nice snug piloting to make the turns.
The river is not always allowed to spread over its whole
bed--which is as much as thirty, and sometimes forty yards
wide--but is split into three equal bodies of water,
by stone dikes which throw the main volume, depth, and current
into the central one. In low water these neat narrow-edged
dikes project four or five inches above the surface,
like the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water
they are overflowed. A hatful of rain makes high water
in the Neckar, and a basketful produces an overflow.

There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current
is violently swift at that point. I used to sit for hours
in m