"So am I," returned the Stove, with an anxious glance at the icy craft. "It won't be more than a minute before I melt my end of the boat all to pieces. I'm afraid we'll have to take to our arctics after all. I brought a pair of your father's along, and it's a good thing for us that he has big feet, for you'll have to get in one and I in the other."
"GOLOSH, AHOY!"
Just then the stern of the boat melted away, and the Stove, springing up from his seat and throwing himself into one of the arctics, with his ammunition and rubber hose, floated off. Jimmieboy had barely time to get into the other arctic when his end of the ice-boat also gave way, and a cross-current in the stream catching the arctic whirled it about and carried it and its little passenger far away from the Stove who shortly disappeared around a turn in the river, so that Jimmieboy was left entirely alone in utter ignorance as to where he really was or what he should do next. Generally Jimmieboy was a very brave little boy, but he found his present circumstances rather trying. To be floating down a strange river in a large overshoe, with absolutely no knowledge of the way home, and a very dim notion only as to how he had managed to get where he was, was terrifying, and when he realized his position, great tears fell from Jimmieboy's eyes, freezing into little pearls of ice before they landed in the bottom of the golosh, where they piled up so rapidly that the strange craft sank further and further into the water and would certainty have sunk with their weight had not the voice Jimmieboy had encountered a little while before come to his rescue.
"Golosh, ahoy!" cried the voice. "Captain! Captain! Lean over the side and cry in the river or you'll sink your boat."
The sound of the voice was a great relief to the little sailor who at once tried to obey the order he had received but found it unnecessary since his tears immediately dried up.
"Come out here in the boat with me!" cried Jimmieboy. "I'm awful lonesome and I don't know what to do."
"Then there is only one thing you can do," said the voice from a point directly over the buckle of the arctic. "And that is to sit still and let time show you. It's a great thing, Jimmieboy, when you don't know what to do and can't find any one to tell you, to sit down and do nothing, because if you did something you'd be likely to find out afterwards that it was the wrong thing. When I was young, in the days when I was what I used to be, I once read a poem that has lingered with me ever since. It was called 'Wait and See' and this is the way it went:
"When you are puzzled what to do,
And no one's nigh to help you out;
You'll find it for the best that you
Should wait until Time gives the clew.
And then your business go about—
Of this there is no doubt.
"Just see the cow! She never knows
What's going to happen next, so she
Contented 'mongst the daises goes,
In clover from her head to toes,
From care and trouble ever free—
She simply waits, you see!
"The horse, unlike the cow, in fear
Jumps to and fro at maddest rate,
Tears down the street, doth snort and rear,
And knocks the wagon out of gear—
And just because he does not wait,
His woes accumulate.
"D. Crockett, famous in the past,
The same sage thought hath briefly wed
To words that must forever last,
Wherever haply they be cast:
'Be sure you're right, then go ahead,'
"That's what D. Crockett said.