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Updated: June 19, 2025
Once a sharp pain, keen as a knife wound, smote his thigh, and he was shaken with despair at the thought that swimmer's cramps dreaded by all men who know the water were about to put an end to the struggle. In the icy depths his bodily heat was flowing from him in a frightfully rapid stream. Closer and closer he swam, and at last only thirty feet of fast, deep water stretched between.
Two of the men rowed, and the third hung over the bows, ready to grasp the miserable wretch. The Grosvenor stood steady, about a mile off, with her mainyards backed; and just as the fellow over the boat's bows caught hold of the swimmer's hair, the ensign was run up on board the ship and dipped three times. "Bring him along!" I shouted. "They'll be off without us if we don't bear a hand."
"My honest friend," said the wise man, pausing solemnly, with the two bottles, like swimmer's bladders, under his arm-pits; "my honest friend, the bedstead you will want; what I propose to remove you will not want." "Oh, I was only joking, Doctor." "I knew that. It's a bad habit, except at the proper time, and with the proper person.
As they worked their way through the scum of many seas, the noon sun broiled their backs into thin water blisters, and stewed saline odors out of the clammy life about them. Once Madden's hand struck a yellowish line of algae and a score or two of little jelly-like insects writhed into the grass below. One of these things touched the swimmer's arm and gave the boy a stinging sensation.
In reality the distance was well over a mile and a quarter, but so clear had the atmosphere suddenly become that the space of tumbled green water intervening looked hardly more than a swimmer's stunt! They cheered and would have waved their caps had they had any to wave. A small steamer was ducking her way along near shore and they could almost see the spray tossing from the bow.
Looking down into the river, I once discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers, all green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for during that length of time the tramp of horses and human footsteps have ceased along this ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm, a space not too wide when the bullets were whistling across.
There had lain my real peril, in the sudden wild-beast rage now suddenly baffled. I read it, as clear as print, and sickened. Nor was Alain in a posture to listen. My kick had sent Moleskin flying on top of him; and borne to earth, prone beneath the superincumbent bulk of his retainer, he lay with hands outspread like a swimmer's and nose buried in the plashy soil.
Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one's feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer's heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it.
They quiver for ever in the currents; they billow in the swaying of tides; they toil in the wake of the junks; they shout in the plunging of breakers. 'Tis their white hands that toss in the leap of the surf; their clutch that clatters the shingle, or seizes the swimmer's feet in the pull of the undertow.
The master of the pool would turn up a fierce eye, and watch the swimmer's progress breaking the golden surface into long, parabolic ripples; but he was too wise to court a trial of the muskrat's long, chisel-like teeth.
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