Not very many miles from its first waterfall the stream had grown so large that my two friends knew that they would soon find their canoes. The plan now was to float down the curious, winding river and to learn, if the river and the banks could tell them, just why the course was so crooked on the map. They came into a broad, level valley where streams met them, coming out of deep clefts between the hills they were leaving behind them. The banks were pebbly, but blackened with slimy mud that made the water murky. The current swerved from one side to the other, sometimes quite close to the bank, where the river turned and formed a deep bend. On this side the bank was steep, the roots of plants and trees exposed. On the opposite side a muddy bank sloped gently out into the stream. Here building up was going on, to offset the tearing down.
The sharp bends are made sharper, once the current is deflected from the middle of the stream to one side. At length the loops bend on each other and come so near together that the current breaks through, leaving a semicircular bayou of still water, and the river's course straightened at that place. It must have been in a spring flood that this cut-off was made, and, the break once made was easily widened, for the soil is fine mud which, when soaked, crumbles and dissolves into muddy water.
Stately and slow that river moves down to the bay, into which it empties its load. The rain that falls on hundreds of square miles of territory flows into the streams that feed this trunk. The little spring that is the headwater of the system is but one of many pockets in the hillsides that hold the water that soaks into the ground and give it out by slow degrees. Surface water after a rain flows quickly into the streams. It is the springs that hold back their supply and keep the rivers from running dry in hot weather.
Do they feel now that they know their river? Are they ready to leave it, and explore some other? Indeed, no. They are barely introduced to it. All kinds of rivers are shown by the different parts of this one. It is a river of the mountains and of the lowland. It flows through woods and prairies, through rocky passes and reedy flats. It races impetuously in its youth, and plods sedately in later life. The trees and the other plants that shadow this stream, and live by its bounty, are very different in the upland and in the lowland. The scenery along this stream shows endless variety. Up yonder all is wild. Down here great bridges span the flood, boats of all kinds carry on the commerce between two neighbour cities. A great park comes down to the river-bank on one side. Canoes are thick as they can paddle on late summer afternoons.
No one can ever really know a river well enough to feel that it is an old story. There is always something new it has to tell its friends. So my two explorers say, and they know far more about their friendly river than I do.
THE WAYS OF RIVERS
A canal is an artificial river, built to carry boats from one place to another. Its course is, as nearly as possible, a straight line between two points. A river, we all agree, is more beautiful than a canal, for it winds in graceful curves, in and out among the hills, its waters seeking the lowest level, always.
No artist could lay out curves more beautiful than the river forms. These curves change from year to year, some slowly, some more rapidly. It is not hard to understand just why these changes take place.
Some rivers are dangerous for boating at certain points. The current is strong, and there are eddies and whirlpools that have to be avoided, or the boat becomes unmanageable. People are drowned each season by trusting themselves to rivers the dangerous tricks of which they do not know. Deep holes are washed out of the bed of the stream by whirling eddies. The pot-holes of which people talk are deep, rounded cavities, ground out of the rocky stream-bed by the scouring of sand and loose stones driven by whirling eddies in shallow basins. Every year deepens each pot-hole until some change in the stream-bed shifts the eddy to another place.