tter human fact thrust upon me again. "What is there left
here to live for?" thought I. And just then I noted, hanging on the wall
where the water did not drip, a neatly framed marriage certificate. This
was the one attempt at decoration.

It was the household's 'scutcheon of respectability. This woman, even in
her degradation, true to the noblest instinct of her sex, clung to this
holy record of a faded glory.

Two days later, pushing on in the starlit night, we heard ahead the
sullen boom of waters in turmoil. For a half-hour, as we proceeded, the
sound increased, until it seemed close under our prow. We knew there
was no cataract in the entire lower portion of the river; and yet, only
from a waterfall had I ever heard a sound like that. We pulled for the
shore, and went to bed with the sinister booming under our bow.

Waking in the gray dawn, we found ourselves at the mouth of the Niobrara
River. Though a small stream compared with the Missouri, so great is its
speed, and so tremendous the impact of its flood, that the mightier, but
less impetuous Missouri is driven back a quarter of a mile.

Reaching Springfield--twelve miles below--before breakfast, in the
evening we lifted Yankton out of a cloud of flying sand. The next day
Vermilion and Elk Point dropped behind; and then, thirty miles of the
two thousand remained.

In the weird hour just before the first faint streak of dawn grows out
of dark, we were making coffee--the last outdoor coffee of the year. Oh,
the ambrosial stuff!

We were under way when the stars paled. At sunrise the smoke of Sioux
City was waving huge ragged arms of welcome out of the southeast. At
noon we landed. We had rowed fourteen hundred miles against almost
continual head winds in a month, and we had finished our two thousand
miles in two months. It was hard work. And yet----

The clang of the trolleys, the rumble of the drays, the rushing of the
people!

I prefer the drifting of the stars, the wandering of the moon, the
coming and going of the sun, the crooning of the river, the shout of the
big, manly, devil-may-care winds, the boom of the diving beaver in the
night.

I never felt at home in a town. Up river when the night dropped over me,
somehow I always felt comfortably, kindly housed. Towns, after all, are
machines to facilitate getting psychically lost.

When I started for the head of navigation a friend asked me what I
expected to find on the trip. "Some more of myself,"