Sometimes, in the lower reaches,
its continuity was broken by a town, but always after it recovered
from its confusion it led on with purpose unvarying. Never did it
desert for long the river. The cool, green still reaches, or the
tumbling of the white-water, were always within its sight, sometimes
beneath its very tread. When occasionally it cut in across a very
long bend, it always sent from itself a little tributary trail which
traced all the curves, and returned at last to its parent,
undoubtedly with a full report of its task. And the trail was
beaten hard by the feet of countless men, who, like Orde and his
crew, had taken grave, interested charge of the river from her birth
to her final rest in the great expanses of the Lake. It is there
to-day, although the life that brought it into being has been gone
from it these many years.
In midsummer Orde found the river trail most unfamiliar in
appearance. Hardly did he recognise it in some places. It
possessed a wide, leisurely expansiveness, an indolent luxury, a
lazy invitation born of broad green leaves, deep and mysterious
shadows, the growth of ferns, docks, and the like cool in the shade
of the forest, the shimmer of aspens and poplars through the heat,
the green of tangling vines, the drone of insects, the low-voiced
call of birds, the opulent splashing of sun-gold through the woods,
quite lacking to the hard, tight season in which his river work was
usually performed.
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