nson, dame jolie,
Ou est alle votre mari?'"

"Ah, toujours les dames!" said Xavier. "But I tell you, Michie, le
diable,--he is at ze bottom of ze Grand Gulf and his mouth open--so."
And he suited the action to the word.

At night we tied up under the shore within earshot of the mutter of the
place, and twice that night I awoke with clinched hands from a dream
of being spun fiercely against the rock of which Xavier had told,
and sucked into the devil's mouth under the water. Dawn came as I was
fighting the mosquitoes,--a still, sultry dawn with thunder muttering in
the distance.

We breakfasted in silence, and with the crew standing ready at the oars
and Xavier scanning the wide expanse of waters ahead, seeking for that
unmarked point whence to embark on this perilous journey, we floated
down the stream. The prospect was sufficiently disquieting on that
murky day. Below us, on the one hand, a rocky bluff reached out into
the river, and on the far side was a timber-clad point round which the
Mississippi doubled and flowed back on itself. It needed no trained eye
to guess at the perils of the place. On the one side the mighty current
charged against the bluff and, furious at the obstacle, lashed itself
into a hundred sucks and whirls, their course marked by the flotsam
plundered from the forests above. Woe betide the boat that got into this
devil's caldron! And on the other side, near the timbered point, ran a
counter current marked by forest wreckage flowing up-stream. To venture
too far on this side was to be grounded or at least to be sent back to
embark once more on the trial.

But where was the channel? We watched Xavier with bated breath. Not once
did he take his eyes from the swirling water ahead, but gave the tiller
a touch from time to time, now right, now left, and called in a monotone
for the port or starboard oars. Nearer and nearer we sped, dodging the
snags, until the water boiled around us, and suddenly the boat
shot forward as in a mill-race, and we clutched the cabin's roof.
A triumphant gleam was in Xavier's eyes, for he had hit the channel
squarely. And then, like a monster out of the deep, the scaly, black
back of a great northern pine was flung up beside us and sheered us
across the channel until we were at the very edge of the foam-specked,
spinning water. But Xavier saw it, and quick as lightning brought his
helm over and laughed as he heard it crunching along our keel. And so
we came