After dark it is weird business to be swimming in strange water—­the throne of mystery, of a thousand terrors.  It is as if one’s grave, full of the blackness of the undiscovered country, were pursuing him and ever yawning beneath his body.  And that big river is the very tiger of waters, now stealing on pussy-footed, now rushing with cat-like swiftness, hissing and striking with currents that have in them mighty sinews.  I was now companion of those cold-mouthed monsters of the river bottom, many of which I had seen.  What if one should lay hold on me and drag me under?  Then I thought of rapids that might smother me with their spray or dash me to hidden rocks.  Often I lifted my ears, marvelling at the many voices of the river.  Sometimes I thought I heard a roaring like that of the Sault, but it was only a ripple growing into fleecy waves that rocked me as in a cradle.  The many sounds were above, below, and beside me, some weird and hollow and unearthly.  I could hear rocks rolling over in their sleep on the bottom, and, when the water was still, a sound like the cropping of lily-pads away off on the river-margin.  The bellowing of a cow terrified me as it boomed over the sounding sheet of water.  The river rang like a mighty drum when a peal of far thunder beat upon it.  I put out my hands to take a stroke or two as I lay on my back, and felt something floating under water.  The feel of it filled me with horror.  I swam faster; it was at my heels.  I knew full well what my hand had touched—­a human head floating face downward:  I could feel the hair in my fingers.  I turned and swam hard, but still it followed me.  My knees hit upon it, and then my feet.  Again and again I could feel it as I kicked.  Its hand seemed to be clutching my trousers.  I thought I should never get clear of the ghastly thing.  I remember wondering if it were the body of poor D’ri.  I turned aside, swimming another way, and then I felt it no more.

In the dead of the night I heard suddenly a kind of throbbing in the breast of the river.  It grew to a noisy heart-beat as I listened.  Again and again I heard it, striking, plashing, like a footfall, and coming nearer.  Somehow I got the notion of a giant, like those of whom my mother had told me long ago, striding in the deep river.  I could hear his boots dripping as he lifted them.  I got an odd fear that he would step on me.  Then I heard music and lifted my ears above water.  It was a voice singing in the distance,—­it must have been a mile off,—­and what I had taken for a near footfall shrank away.  I knew now it was the beat of oars in some far bay.

A long time after I had ceased to hear it, something touched my shoulder and put me in a panic.  Turning over, I got a big mouthful of water.  Then I saw it was a gang of logs passing me, and quickly caught one.  Now, to me the top side of a log was as easy and familiar as a rocking-chair.  In a moment I was sitting comfortably on my captive.  A bit of rubbish, like that the wind had sown, trailed after the gang of logs, I felt it over, finding a straw hat and a piece of board some three feet long, with which latter I paddled vigorously.