iver. When
the water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave up
the hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose to
within a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had been
there to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers and
swept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward.
Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happen
in the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning that
the bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a little
comfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go,
watching as far into the night as nine o'clock with the men who sat up
near the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but not
perhaps the leading citizens.

SWIMMING

There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the flood
and the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but it
left no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshet
rushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking;
it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period of
fishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish in
that part of the Miami; my boy's experience was full of the ignominy of
catching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they called
the yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore,
who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men who
were reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass.
They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets that
they did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boy
scarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast his
line in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. These
men often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when taken
inwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for their
ability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing that
they should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where they
had set their poles. But they disappear like persons in a dream, and
their fishing-time vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full
possession of the river, and of all the other waters of the Boy's Town.

[Illustration]

The swimming-holes in the river were the grea