The Neckar is in many places so narrow that a person can throw a dog across it, if he has one; when it is also sharply curved in such places, the raftsman has to do some pretty nice snug piloting to make the turns.  The river is not always allowed to spread over its whole bed—­which is as much as thirty, and sometimes forty yards wide—­but is split into three equal bodies of water, by stone dikes which throw the main volume, depth, and current into the central one.  In low water these neat narrow-edged dikes project four or five inches above the surface, like the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water they are overflowed.  A hatful of rain makes high water in the Neckar, and a basketful produces an overflow.

There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current is violently swift at that point.  I used to sit for hours in my glass cage, watching the long, narrow rafts slip along through the central channel, grazing the right-bank dike and aiming carefully for the middle arch of the stone bridge below; I watched them in this way, and lost all this time hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck itself sometime or other, but was always disappointed.  One was smashed there one morning, but I had just stepped into my room a moment to light a pipe, so I lost it.

While I was looking down upon the rafts that morning in Heilbronn, the daredevil spirit of adventure came suddenly upon me, and I said to my comrades: 

“I am going to Heidelberg on a raft.  Will you venture with me?”

Their faces paled a little, but they assented with as good a grace as they could.  Harris wanted to cable his mother—­thought it his duty to do that, as he was all she had in this world—­so, while he attended to this, I went down to the longest and finest raft and hailed the captain with a hearty “Ahoy, shipmate!” which put us upon pleasant terms at once, and we entered upon business.  I said we were on a pedestrian tour to Heidelberg, and would like to take passage with him.  I said this partly through young Z, who spoke German very well, and partly through Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly.  I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

The captain hitched up his trousers, then shifted his quid thoughtfully.  Presently he said just what I was expecting he would say—­that he had no license to carry passengers, and therefore was afraid the law would be after him in case the matter got noised about or any accident happened.  So I chartered the raft and the crew and took all the responsibilities on myself.

With a rattling song the starboard watch bent to their work and hove the cable short, then got the anchor home, and our bark moved off with a stately stride, and soon was bowling along at about two knots an hour.