"What is the matter with YOU, pray?"
"I am feeling frightened," I muttered in response.
"Feeling frightened of WHAT, indeed?"
"Of being drowned."
"Pooh! Just you hold your tongue."
Yet the next moment he glanced at me, and added in a gentler, quieter tone:
"None but a fool gets drowned. Pick yourself up and come along."
Then once more he shouted full-throated words of encouragement to his men; and as he did so, his chest swelled and his head rocked with the effort.
Yet, crackling and cracking, the ice was breaking up; and soon it began slowly to bear us past the town. 'Twas as though some unknown force ashore had awakened, and was striving to tear the banks of the river in two, so much did the portion of the landscape downstream seem to be standing still while the portion level with us seemed to be receding in the opposite direction, and thus causing a break to take place in the middle of the picture.
And soon this movement, a movement agonisingly slow, deprived me of my sense of being connected with the rest of the world, until, as the whole receded, despair again gripped my heart and unnerved my limbs. Roseate clouds were gliding across the sky and causing stray fragments of the ice, which, seemingly, yearned to engulf me, to assume reflected tints of a similar hue. Yes, it was as though the birth of spring had reawakened the universe, and was causing it to stretch itself, and to emit deep, hurried, broken pants that cracked its bones as the river, embedded in the earth's stout framework, revivified the whole with thick, turbulent, ebullient blood.