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At each picturesque fording-place, with its inevitable watering-pool, are stepping-stones for foot pilgrims; often a flock of geese are sailing in the pool, with craned necks and flapping wings hissing defiance to disturbers of their sylvan peace.

Resuming their march, they ascended the stream about eighteen miles, where they found a fording-place and crossed over to the northern bank. Here there opened before them a rich and beautiful prairie, bordered with gentle eminences on the north and the south. This prairie extended about twenty miles along the banks of the river and was nearly six miles wide.

Pittsburg, from a small trading hamlet and fording-place, had grown by 1785 to have a thousand inhabitants, chiefly supported by boat-building and the Kentucky carrying trade; and boat-yards were common up both the Monongahela and the Youghiogheny, for a distance of sixty miles.

Gage, however, succeeded in rallying about eighty beyond the other fording-place; and Washington, on an order from Braddock, spurred his jaded horse towards the camp of Dunbar to demand wagons, provisions, and hospital stores. Fright overcame fatigue.

Mazeppa's Ukraine stallion, or the mightiest destrier that ever Paladin bestrode, would have been whirled away like withered leaves, ere they had swum ten of the seven hundred yards that lay between us and the Virginia shore. I could hardly believe my eyes, when Hoyle pointed out to me the fording-place where, on the 23d of last December, he had crossed without wetting his horse's girth.

It was in the third week after his hurt that Peter saw Nada. By that time he could easily follow Jolly Roger as far as the fording-place, and there he would wait, sometimes hours at a stretch, while his comrade and master went over to Cragg's Ridge.

Beverly said to me one evening, as we rounded a low hill and followed a deep little creek down to a shallow fording-place. "All we want is a real princess and a real giant. Look at these big trees all you can, for Jondo says pretty soon we won't see trees at all." "Maybe we'll have Indians instead of giants," I suggested.

Captain Bonneville measured the stream at that point, found it to be twenty-two hundred yards wide, and from three to six feet deep, the bottom full of quicksand. On the 11th of the same month the party arrived at the forks of the Platte, but finding it impossible to cross on account of the quicksand, they travelled for two days along the south branch, trying to discover a safe fording-place.

We are coming to the ancient fording-place of the river, called Adamah, where an event once happened which was of great consequence to the Israelites and which has often been misunderstood. They were encamped on the east side, opposite Jericho, nearly thirty miles below this point, waiting for their first opportunity to cross the Jordan.

To facilitate this fording, Kit Carson crossed and recrossed the stream at least twenty times. No serious accident occurred, although three of the dragoons came near being swept down the current, which, at the time, was very swift and strong. Had they gone below the fording-place, they would most assuredly have been drowned, as the river there takes a fearful leap through a cut in the rocks.