looked at Miranda. She gave him a shining glance of comprehension.

"It's the rapids!" she cried. "Do we go through those?"

Dave laughed.

"Not those! Not by a long chalk! That's the 'Big Soo' ye hear, an' it's more a fall than a rapid. Ther's an eddy an' a still water jest below, an' that's where we take to the canoe."

As they went on, the great swelling noise seemed to Miranda to fill her soul, and worked a deep yet still excitement within her. Nevertheless, rapidly as its volume increased, the light chatter of the brook was upborne distinctly upon the flood of it. Then, suddenly, as the forest thinned ahead, and the white daylight confronted them, the voice of the brook was in an instant overwhelmed, utterly effaced. The softly pervasive thunder burst all at once into a trembling roar, vehement, conflicting, explosive; and they came out full in face of a long, distorted slope of cataract. White, yellow, tawny green, the waves bounded and wallowed down the loud

steep; and here and there the black bulks of rock shouldered upward, opposing them eternally.

Spellbound at the sight, Miranda stood gazing, while Dave fetched from the bushes a ruddy-yellow canoe of birch bark, and launched it in a quiet but foam-flecked back-water at their feet. In the bow he placed a compact bundle of bracken for Miranda to sit upon, with another flat bundle at her back, that the cross-bar might not gall her.

"Best fer ye to sit low, Mirandy, 'stead o'kneelin',” he explained, "coz I'll be standin' up, with the pole, goin' through some o' the rips, an' ye'll be steadier sittin' than kneelin'."

"But I paddle better kneeling," pro

tested Miranda.

"Ye won't need to paddle," said Dave, a little grimly. "Ye'll jest maybe fend a rock now an' agin, that's all. The current an' me'll do the rest."

The fall of the "Big Soo" ended in a basin very wide and deep, whose spacious caverns absorbed the fury of the waters

and allowed them to flow off sullenly. Dave knelt in the stern, paddle in hand, and the long pole of white spruce sticking out behind the canoe, where he could lay his grasp upon it in an instant. A couple of strokes sent the little craft out into the smooth, purplish-amber swirls of the deep current, whereon the froth clusters wheeled slowly. A few minutes more and a green fringed overhang of rock was rounded, the last energy of the current spent itself in a deep and roomy channel, the uproar of the cataract mellowed suddenly to that pulsating thunder which they had heard at first, and the canoe, under Dave's noiseless propulsion, shot forward over a surface as of dark brown glass. There was a mile of this still water, along which Miranda insisted upon paddling. The rocks rose straight from the channel, and the trees hung down from their rim, and the June sun, warmly flooding the trough of rock and water, made its grimness greatly beautiful. Then the rocks diminished, and the steep, richly green slopes of the hillsides came down to the water's edge,

and a rushing clamour began to swell in the distance. The currents awakened under the canoe, which darted forward more swiftly. The shouting of the "rips" seemed to rush up stream to meet them. The surface of the river began to slant away before them, not breaking yet, but furrowing into long, thready streaks. Then, far down the slant, a tossing white line of short breakers, drawn right across the channel, clambered toward them ravenously.

"Ye'd better not paddle now, Mirandy," said Dave, in a quiet voice, standing up for a moment to survey the channel, while the canoe slipped swiftly down toward the turmoil. "There's rapids now all the way down to Gabe's clearing. An' we won't be long goin', neither."

A moment more, and to Miranda it seemed that the leafy shores ran by her, that the gnashing phalanx of the waves sprang up at her. She had never run a rapid before. Her experience of canoeing had all been gained on the lake. She caught her breath, but did not flinch as the tumbling waters seethed and yammered