What was there now to do? To go back,--to go back,--not if she were torn
by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of
creation. God had said to her,--"Let there be light." How could she,
then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,--it might be weeks
before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,--she would be seized as
a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But
with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she
sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver
leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their
crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the
bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again
about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its
luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little
black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the
other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something
curiously like a weed swaying up and down.
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