through the water behind me.  The breeze had freshened a little, and my boat drifted about fast enough for trollin’, and feelin’ a little drowsy, I tied the end of the line to the cleets across the knees of the boat, and lay down in the bottom with my hand out over the side holdin’ the line.  I hadn’t laid there long, when I felt a twitch as if something mighty big was medlin’ with the other end of the string.  I started up and undertook to pull in, but you might as well undertake to drag an elephant with a thread.  I couldn’t move him a hair.  Pretty soon the boat began to move up the lake in a way I didn’t at all like.  At first it went may be three miles an hour, then five, ten, twenty, forty, sixty miles the hour, round and round the lake, as if hurled along by a million of locomotives.  We went skiving around among the islands, into the bays, along the shore, away out across the lake, crossing and re-crossing in every direction; and if there’s a place about this lake we didn’t visit, I should like to have somebody tell me where it is.  You may think it made my hair stand out some, to find myself flyin’ about like a streak of chain lightnin’, and to see the trees and rocks flyin’ like mad the other way.  I tried to untie the line, but it was drawn into a knot so hard, that the old Nick himself couldn’t move it.  I looked for my knife to cut it, but it had, somehow, got overboard in our flight, besides flyin’ about at the rate of sixty mile an hour, kept a fellow pretty busy holdin’ on, keepin’ his place in the boat.

“After an hour or two we came to a pause, and the old feller that was towin’ me about, walked up to the surface, and stickin’ his head out of the water, ‘Good mornin’,’ says he, in a very perlite sort of way.  ‘Good mornin’,’ says I, back again.  ‘How goes it?’ says he.  ’All right,’ says I.  ’Step this way and I’ll take the hook out of your gums.’  ‘Thank you for nothing,’ says he, and he opened his month like the entrance to a railroad tunnel, and blame me, if he hadn’t taken a double hitch of the line around his eye tooth, while the hook hung harmless beside his jaw.

“‘I’ve a little business down in the lower lake,’ says he, ’and must be movin’,’ and away he bolted like a steam engine, down the lake.  When he straightened up, my hat flew more than sixty yards behind me, and the way I came down into the bottom of the boat was anything but pleasant.  Away we tore down towards the outlet, the boat cuttin’ and plowin’ through the water, pilin’ it up in great furrows ten feet high on each side.  There is, as you know, sixty feet fall between the Upper Saranac and Round Lake, and the river goes boilin’ and roarin’, tumblin’ and heavin’ down the rapids and over the rocks, pitchin’ in some places square down a dozen feet among the boulders.  No sensible man would think of travellin’ that road in a little craft like mine, unless he’d made up his mind to see how it would seem to be drowned, or smashed to pieces agin the rocks.  But right down