Bushwhacking thus for a league, we circumvented the peril, and came upon the river flowing fair and free.  The trappers said adieu, and launched us.  Back then they went to consult their traps and flay their fragrant captives, and we shot forward.

That was a day all poetry and all music.  Mountain airs bent and blunted the noonday sunbeams.  There was shade of delicate birches on either hand, whenever we loved to linger.  Our feather-shallop went dancing on, fleet as the current, and whenever a passion for speed came after moments of luxurious sloth, we could change floating at the river’s will into leaps and chasing, with a few strokes of the paddle.  All was untouched, unvisited wilderness, and we from bend to bend the first discoverers.  So we might fancy ourselves; for civilization had been here only to cut pines, not to plant houses.  Yet these fair curves, and liberal reaches, and bright rapids of the birchen-bowered river were only solitary, not lonely.  It is never lonely with Nature.  Without unnatural men or unnatural beasts, she is capital society by herself.  And so we found her,—­a lovely being in perfect toilet, which I describe, in an indiscriminating, masculine way, by saying that it was a forest and a river and lakes and a mountain and doubtless sky, all made resplendent by her judicious disposition of a most becoming light.  Iglesias and I, being old friends, were received into close intimacy.  She smiled upon us unaffectedly, and had a thousand exquisite things to say, drawing us out also, with feminine tact, to say our best things, and teaching us to be conscious, in her presence, of more delicate possibilities of refinement and a tenderer poetic sense.  So we voyaged through the sunny hours, and were happy.

Yet there was no monotony in our progress.  We could not always drift and glide.  Sometimes we must fight our way.  Below the placid reaches were the inevitable “rips” and rapids:  some we could shoot without hitting anything; some would hit us heavily, did we try to shoot.  Whenever the rocks in the current were only as thick as the plums in a boarding-school pudding, we could venture to run the gantlet; whenever they multiplied to a school-boy’s ideal, we were arrested.  Just at the brink of peril we would sweep in by an eddy into a shady pool by the shore.  At such spots we found a path across the carry.  Cancut at once proceeded to bonnet himself with the trickling birch.  Iglesias and I took up the packs and hurried on with minds intent on berries.  Berries we always found,—­blueberries covered with a cloudy bloom, blueberries pulpy, saccharine, plenteous.