ble his efforts.
But he would never again be quite without sympathy, quite without
understanding of sensations and experiences which were not of his own
heart and soul.

The river was a mile wide; its current surged from the deeps; it
flowed down the bend and along the reach with a noiselessness, a
resistlessness, a magnitude that seemed to carry him out of his whole
previous existence--and so it did carry him. Still human, still finite,
prone to error and lack of comprehension, nevertheless Augustus
Carline entered for the moment upon a new life recklessly and
willingly.

CHAPTER X

For a minute Elijah Rasba, as the Mississippi revealed itself to him,
contemplated a greater field for service than he had ever dreamed of.
Then, humbled in his pride at the thought of great success, he felt that
it could not be; for such an opportunity an Apostle was needed, and
Rasba's cheeks warmed with shame at the realization of the vanity in his
momentary thought.

He was grateful for the privilege of seeing the panorama that unrolled
and unfolded before his eyes with the same slow dignity with which the
great storm clouds boiled up from the long backs of the mountains of his
own homeland. He missed the elevations, the clustered wildernesses, and
ledges of stone against a limited sky, but in their places he saw the
pale heavens in a dome that was uninterrupted from horizon to horizon.
There seemed to be hardly any earth commensurate with the sky, and the
river seemed to be flowing between bounds so low and insignificant that
he felt as though it might break through one side or the other and fall
into the chaos beyond the brim of the world.

Instinctively he removed his hat in this Cathedral. Familiar from
childhood with mountains and deep valleys, the sense of power and motion
in the river appealed to him as the ocean might have done. He looked
about him with curiosity and inquiry. He felt as though there must be
some special meaning for him in that immediate moment, and it was a long
time before he could quite believe that this thing which he witnessed
had continued far back beyond the memory of men, and would continue into
the unquestionable future.

He floated down stream from bend to bend, carried along as easily as in
the full run of time. He looked over vast reaches, and hardly recognized
other houseboats, tucked in holes along the banks, as craft like his
own. The clusters of houses on points of low ridges did n