the shore, and then lay down on the thwarts in the sun, and let the boat drift by the hour whither it would.  We seldom talked.  It interrupted the Sabbath stillness, and marred the dreams the luxurious rest and indolence brought.  The shore all along was indented with deep, curved bays and coves, bordered by 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 “before” the establishment of the Reserve, and the other as it would be “now.”

AS IT WAS IN 1861