United States or Fiji ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
So, with alternate feasting and fasting we passed the long weeks of that Arctic winter until the frogs in the neighboring swamp crying: "Knee deep, knee deep," and "better go round, better go round," proclaimed the season of freshets when the vast plain below us was traversible only in boats.
It was full of charms and changes, of varying moods and sudden surprises. Its voice stole in upon his ear with a melody far sweeter and more subtle than the boom of the ocean. Yet it was not without strength, and when it was swollen with the freshets of the spring and brimming with the bounty of its sister streams, it could dash and roar, boom and crash, with the best of them.
He was enabled to push along at this unusual rate on account of the freshets swelling the river to a flood. He passed in safety the perilous rapids of the Saute du Rhone; but near the frontier of France he had a marvelous escape from a frightful death. The authorities on the frontier are kept busy watching for smugglers who work contraband goods from Switzerland into France.
So long as there were great areas of unrestricted flood-plain above Vicksburg to impound the freshets and lower their crests, the levees below required no great height or strength; but the tasks of reclamation were at best arduous enough to make rapid expansion depend upon the spur of great expectations.
The grass grows thick among the broken stones, and men and beasts have made a narrow beaten track along the extreme outside edge of the precipice. The new bridge which was standing in all its spick and span newness when you came last year, is a ruin now, washed away by the spring freshets.
But the river won't get very high at this season, or at any rate it won't rise to anywhere near the top of the hammock, as I have already explained to you, because it is evidently only the biggest freshets that ever come near the top, and the biggest freshets never come in the fall, but always in the spring. It isn't rising fast enough either.
They eat the tender shoots of the trees. The trampling of sheep, especially on steep hills, damages the very young trees. On mountain sides the trampling of sheep frequently breaks up the forest floor of sponge-like grass and debris and thus aids freshets and floods. In the Alps of France sheep grazing destroyed the mountain forests and, later on, the grass which replaced the woods.
Then it rose again in another place, then in another; then five or six little freshets rose all at once, the rings crossing and recrossing.
The Cass Branch had shrunken almost to its original limits. Only here and there a little bayou or marsh attested recent freshets. The drive must have been finished, even this early, for the stream in its present condition would hardly float saw logs, certainly not in quantity. Thorpe, puzzled, walked on. At the banking ground he found empty skids. Evidently the drive was over.
Lincoln kept in mind one of his favorite stories: the one on the Methodist Presiding Elder who was riding about his circuit during the spring freshets.
Word Of The Day