ake with the water extending for miles on either side.

After terrible vicissitudes the captain at last breathed freely when at
the end of some weeks the "Jason" was rising and falling in half a gale
well out to sea.

"Hah!" he said; "this is something like. I can turn in now for a rest
without expecting to be capsized by being swept over a clump of trees.
There's nothing like the sea, after all."

"But what about going up the river again?" asked Briscoe.

"It will be in flood for months to come, sir, I should say, and my
advice would be for us to get safe home with what we've got, and make
another trip next year."

The captain's advice was taken, and to a man the men volunteered to go
again the next season.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

That trip was made, and proved to be quite a blank, for the brig was
never got up to the falls.

The next year, though, the party started with high hopes, for the
weather was magnificent, and they reached the falls; but not without
finding that the course of the river had been a good deal altered by two
seasons of tremendous floods.

But there were the stupendous falls and one morning, leaving the brig
snugly anchored in a bay of the river to wait for her golden freight,
three boats, with the men well armed, started for their journey up
stream.

The course of the river below the falls had been greatly altered, but
that was as nothing to the complete change in the network of rivers
higher up.

Let it suffice to say that they rowed and sailed for days which grew
into weeks, and then to months, from river into river, and then in and
out of what was a great watery puzzle; but the canon with its golden
city might have sunk right out of sight, for in spite of every effort
the party were driven back at last when the torrential rains set in.

The next year the captain said he had had enough of it, and Brace and
his brother declined to go, the latter saying that the proverb was
right: "You can buy gold too dearly."

Briscoe then declared that he would freight another brig and go by
himself.

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He went, and, at the end of six months, returned, visited London, and
called upon his old companion.

"Haven't found it yet," he said; "but there's a lot of gold there, and I
mean to try till I do."

Brace met him again and again as the years rolled on, but he had not