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Updated: May 2, 2025
"Yes, he says I'm too thin-skinned." Joe stood for a moment with the front page of the paper still in his hand. Something of Jonathan came into his face, the same firm lines about his mouth that his father had when he crawled under the floor timbers of the mill to save Baker's girl, pinned down and drowning, the night of the freshet.
A procession of carts, each drawn by a pair of mules, and driven by a fat and happy negro, who seemed to joke with every motion and laugh all over from head to foot, came from the sugar-house to get wood, of which an immense quantity was lying upon the banks of the river, saved from the vast mass of forest trees washed down at every freshet.
But most of them were lying where they had been built, or left by the preceding tide, along high-water mark, as hopelessly stranded, for the next two hours, as a birch log after a freshet. As the old women with children arrived, Bawr rushed them down the wet beach to the rafts which were afloat, appointing to each clumsy raft four men, with long, rough flattened poles, to manage it.
Once it had been possible to ride along the edge, but the river had torn away what there was of margin in a freshet, so that we had to cross perpetually, to attain the rough, boulder-strewn strips which lay between the cliffs and itself.
McGowan, he was sorry to say, who was building the masonry, had attempted an overcharge which only Mr. Minott's watchful eye could have detected, adding, with a glance over his shoulder, that the collapse of the embankment had undermined the contractor's reputation quite as much as the freshet had his culvert, at which MacFarlane smiled but made no reply.
This fact, of itself, proved that no one tree of them all was very old; a circumstance that was certainly owing to the ravages of the annual freshets. I say annual; for though the freshet which now encompassed us, was far more serious than usual, each year brought something of the sort; and the islands were constantly increasing or diminishing under their action.
On either side of the stream the banks rise in benches, each a little higher and broader and more heavily covered: the first pure sand, laid on by the last freshet; the next grown over with grass and weeds; the next bushed up with baby willows and arrow weed; and then, the high bench, studded with mesquite and palo verdes; and at the base of the solid rim perhaps a higher level, strewn with the rocks which time and the elements have hurled down from the cliff, and crested with ancient trees.
This path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the lake to the gulf.
Drolly, yet with tenderness for others, it portrayed mountain storm, valley freshet, and heart-breaking night marches beside tottering guns in the straining, sucking, leaden-heavy, red clay, and then, raptly, the glories of sunrise and sunset over the contours of the Blue Ridge.
The fields have crept up to the very summit of the hills, and even the stream that came down from the mountain has vanished away, save when the rains, or the melting snows send it in a freshet over the rocks where, when I was a boy, it was cascading always.
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