narrow sand-beaches; and where the sand ended, the steep
mountain-sides rose right up aloft into space--rose up like
a vast wall a little out of the perpendicular, and thickly
wooded with tall pines.

So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only
twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly
distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! Yes, where
it was even _eighty_ feet deep. Every little pebble was
distinct, every speckled trout, every hand's-breadth of sand.
Often, as we lay on our faces, a granite bowlder, as large as
a village church, would start out of the bottom apparently,
and seem climbing up rapidly to the surface, till presently
it threatened to touch our faces, and we could not resist the
impulse to seize an oar and avert the danger. But the boat
would float on, and the bowlder descend again, and then we
could see that when we had been exactly above it, it must have
been twenty or thirty feet below the surface. Down through
the transparency of these great depths, the water was not
_merely_ transparent, but dazzlingly, brilliantly so. All
objects seen through it had a bright, strong vividness, not
only of outline, but of every minute detail, which they
would not have had when seen simply through the same depth of
atmosphere. So empty and airy did all spaces seem below
us, and so strong was the sense of floating high aloft
in mid-nothingness, that we called these boat-excursions
"balloon-voyages."

We fished a good deal, but we did not average one fish a
week. We could see trout by the thousand winging about in the
emptiness under us, or sleeping in shoals on the bottom, but
they would not bite--they could see the line too plainly,
perhaps. We frequently selected the trout we wanted, and
rested the bait patiently and persistently on the end of his
nose at a depth of eighty feet, but he would only shake it off
with an annoyed manner, and shift his position.[1]

[Footnote 1: These extracts are made from Mark Twain's copyrighted
works by especial arrangement with his publishers, Harper & Bros.,
New York.]

CHAPTER B

MARK TWAIN AND THE FOREST RANGERS

In a quarterly magazine published solely for the Rangers of the Tahoe
Reserve, one of the Rangers thus "newspaperizes" Mark's experiences
in two different sketches, one as it was in 1861 "be