Martin Morse stood enthralled and mystified.  It was as if some invisible Asmodeus had revealed to this simple frontiersman a world of which he had never dreamed.  It was the world—­a world of which he knew nothing in his simple, rustic habits and profound Western isolation—­sweeping by him with the rush of an unknown planet.  In another moment it was gone; a shower of sparks shot up from one of the towers and fell all around him, and then vanished, even as he remembered the set piece of “Fourth of July” fireworks had vanished in his own rural town when he was a boy.  The darkness fell with it too.  But such was his utter absorption and breathless preoccupation that only a cold chill recalled him to himself, and he found he was standing mid-leg deep in the surge cast over the low banks by this passage of the first steamboat he had ever seen!

He waited for it the next night, when it appeared a little later from the opposite direction on its return trip.  He watched it the next night and the next.  Hereafter he never missed it, coming or going—­whatever the hard and weary preoccupations of his new and lonely life.  He felt he could not have slept without seeing it go by.  Oddly enough, his interest and desire did not go further.  Even had he the time and money to spend in a passage on the boat, and thus actively realize the great world of which he had only these rare glimpses, a certain proud, rustic shyness kept him from it.  It was not his world; he could not affront the snubs that his ignorance and inexperience would have provoked, and he was dimly conscious, as so many of us are in our ignorance, that in mingling with it he would simply lose the easy privileges of alien criticism.  For there was much that he did not understand, and some things that grated upon his lonely independence.

One night, a lighter one than those previous, he lingered a little longer in the moonlight to watch the phosphorescent wake of the retreating boat.  Suddenly it struck him that there was a certain irregular splashing in the water, quite different from the regular, diagonally crossing surges that the boat swept upon the bank.  Looking at it more intently, he saw a black object turning in the water like a porpoise, and then the unmistakable uplifting of a black arm in an unskillful swimmer’s overhand stroke.  It was a struggling man.  But it was quickly evident that the current was too strong and the turbulence of the shallow water too great for his efforts.  Without a moment’s hesitation, clad as he was in only his shirt and trousers, Morse strode into the reeds, and the next moment, with a call of warning, was swimming toward the now wildly struggling figure.  But, from some unknown reason, as Morse approached him nearer the man uttered some incoherent protest and desperately turned away, throwing off Morse’s extended arm.