"About six feet, I reckon," said the captain, "but this is an unusually low tide. In fact, we haven't had a tide as low as this in years. I don't know when I've seen that bar out of water before. This stiff northeast wind, coming straight down the river, has blown the water all out into the Bay."
"Has the river fallen as much back at the pier as it has here?" asked Alec, examining the shore carefully.
"Sure thing. There's enough water to float a boat off the ends of the piers, but the slips between 'em, where you saw the scows, haven't an inch of water in 'em. They're only mud-flats, now."
In the darkness Alec hadn't seen much of the scows, but he did not tell the captain so. Instead, he said, "It's wonderful. Will it all run back now?"
"You'll see it start to flow back in a few minutes. Of course this won't be a very high tide, for the wind that blew the water out of the river will keep some of it from running back."
"Suppose the wind were blowing in exactly the opposite direction," said Alec. "Would it blow the river full of water?"
"That's exactly what it would do. When that happens the water sometimes gets up over the pier you slept on. That's a couple of feet higher than common."
"Whew!" whistled Alec. "That's like our spring-floods inland. Everything gets covered with water."
"Pretty much the same thing," said the captain. "But we'd a good deal rather have a high tide than one of your floods. High tides don't do so much damage as your floods. And then the tides help us a great deal. But they was more useful before the days of power boats than they are now. In them days, if there wasn't any wind to blow your boat, all you had to do was to wait for the tide to change, and you could go up-stream or down without a bit of wind. But now that we use gasoline, we don't pay much attention to the tide."
Alec glanced out of the window again. The chips and bubbles that had been floating down-stream were now moving ever so slightly in the opposite direction.