ng at your ankles; and growling: "Aw, you think you're some, don't
you? Yes. Well, for half a cent wouldn't take you out and drown you."
And I don't like the looks of that boat patrolling up and down between
the ropes and the raft. It is too suggestive, too like the skeleton at
the banquet, too blunt a reminder that maybe what the undertow growls is
not all a bluff.

Another drawback to the ocean as a swimming-hole is that the distances
are all wrong. If you want to go to the other side of the "crick"
you must take a steamboat. There is no such thing as bundling up your
clothes and holding them out of water with one hand while you swim with
the other, perhaps dropping your knife or necktie in transit. I have
never been on the other side of the "crick" even on a steamboat, but
I am pretty sure that there are no yellow-hammers' nests over there or
watermelon patches. There were above the dam. At the seaside they give
you as an objective point a raft, anchored at what seems only a little
distance from where it gets deep enough to swim in, but which turns out
to be a mighty far ways when the water bounces so. When you get there,
blowing like a quarter-horse and weighing nine tons as you lift yourself
out, there is nothing to do but let your feet hang over while you get
rested enough to swim back. It wasn't like that above the dam.

I tell you the ocean is altogether too big. Some profess to admire it
on that account, but it is my belief that they do it to be in style.
I admit that on a bright, blowy day, when you can sit and watch the
shining sails far out on the horizon's rim, it does look right nice,
but I account for it in this way: it puts you in mind of some of these
expensive oil paintings, and that makes you think it is kind of high
class. And another thing: It recalls the picture in the joggerfy that
proved the earth was round because the hull of a ship disappears before
the sails, as it would if the ship was going over a hill. You sweep your
eye along where the sky and water meet, and it seems you can note the
curvature of the earth. Maybe it is that, and maybe it is all in your
own eye. I am not saying.

There are good points, too, about the sea on a clear night when the moon
is full; or when there is no moon, and the phosphorescence in the water
shows, as if mermaids' children were playing with blue-tipped matches. I
like to see it when a gale is blowing, and the white caps race. Yes, and
when it is a flat calm