10. And Tom could not stop and did not care to stop; he would see the great world below, and the salmon, and the breakers, and the wide, wide sea.
II
11. And when the day came, Tom found himself out in the salmon river. And after a while he came to a place where the river spread out into broad, still, shallow reaches so wide that little Tom, as he put his head out of the water, could hardly see across.
12. And there he stopped. He got a little frightened. "This must be the sea," he thought. "What a wide place it is! If I go on into it, I shall surely lose my way or some strange thing will bite me. I will stop here and look out for the otter or the eels, or some one to tell me where I shall go."
13. So he went back a little way and crept into a crack of the rock, just where the river opened out into the wide shallows, and watched for some one to tell him his way; but the otter and the eels were gone on miles and miles down the stream.
14. There he waited, and slept, too, for he was quite tired with his night's journey; and when he woke, the stream was clearing to a beautiful amber hue, though it was still very high.
15. Tom went on down, and, as he went, all the vale looked sad. The red and yellow leaves showered down into the river; the flies and beetles were all dead and gone; the chill autumn fog lay low upon the hills, and sometimes spread itself so thickly on the river that he could not see his way.
16. But he felt his way instead, following the flow of the stream day after day, past great bridges, past boats and barges, past the great town with its wharves and mills and tall smoking chimneys, and ships which rode at anchor in the stream; and now and then he ran against their hawsers and wondered what they were, and peeped out and saw the sailors lounging on board, and ducked under again, for he was terribly afraid of being caught by man and turned into a chimney sweep once more.
