The river was swollen with three days’ tropical downpour and running out resistlessly in the teeth of a high tide.  As we slipped out of the shallow water at the bank, the current caught us and hurled us fifty feet down stream.  The baroto left apparently for the port, which was four miles away.  Our valiant punters were useless against the river; but amid a hubbub in which every man, woman, and babe aboard, except one American man and myself, appeared to be giving orders, we got back to the bank and shipped an additional crew.  This consumed time, because the spectators, who had seen what work it was going to be, were coy of enlisting.  But at last we got away, eight men to a side, and the water perceptibly nearer the gunwales, and with infinite labor we succeeded in poling around a bend and leaving the town behind us.

But there we stuck again in a swift reach, and there were time and opportunity to marvel at the impenetrable green and silence of the nipa swamps.  The banks—­or rather limits of the current—­were thickets of water grass six feet high, its roots sunk in ooze.  Here and there a rise of ground betrayed itself in a few cocoanuts, the ragged fans of tall bouri palms, or a plume-like clump of bamboo and the hospitable shade of a magnificent mango tree.

The atmosphere was close and muggy, and now and then a shower pattered down on us.  Suddenly, through the strange desolation of this alien landscape, the familiar thump of guitars and mandolins assailed the stillness.  The music carried me back to half-forgotten experiences—­red sunsets between the cathedral bluffs of the Mississippi, and sad-eyed negroes twanging the strings on the forward deck of a nosing steamboat; crisp July afternoons on the Straits of Mackinac when the wind swept in from froth-capped blue Huron, and the little excursion steamer from St. Ignace rollicked her way homeward to the cottage-crowned heights of the island.

I shut my eyes and tried to “make believe” that they would open on far-off, familiar scenes.  Nothing could have been more weird and incongruous than the American air with this alien soil and people.  It was “Hiawatha,” and to the inspiring strains of “Let the women do the work, let the men take it easy,” our forgotten baroto swept into sight in the easy water under the opposite bank.  We made a herculean effort, inspired by envy, and got away.  Space forbids me to enumerate the hairbreadth escapes of that journey.  We put men ashore when the banks permitted and were towed like a canal boat.  Once we were swept into mid-stream, where the poles were useless on account of the great depth, and had to drift back till the water shoaled again.  In late afternoon we took on a supply of sugar cane, and chewed affably all the rest of the way.

At first I had been nervous, but my native friends were quite unconcerned.  So remembering that Heaven protects the insane and the imbecile, and regarding them as the former and myself as the latter, I ceased to speculate on the probabilities of another incarnation.