Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/297

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ETHICS OF BOXING AND MANLY SPORT.

ing at the bridges, devouring the fields, deluging farm-houses and streets, until its fury is glutted on the blind selfishness that gave it birth.

Pittsburgh riots and Susquehanna devastations are children of the same parents,—Greed and Ignorance. Beautiful trees and beautiful souls, steeped in the coal-pits, scorched by the cinders, thundered over by the roaring wheels that carry treasures to the cultured and luxurious, there is a curse in your defilement and mutilation. Yet our moralists and socialists will not listen and understand.

But who shall be didactic in a canoe on a river that laughs into little rapids every few hundred yards? It was delightful to see Smith take his first rapid. He had only canoed before in still water. A few miles below Binghamton we heard the break of the water, and saw the zigzag line ahead. Not knowing the nature of the thing, whether it was a dam, an "eel-rack," a wood-shoot, or a natural shoal, I paddled ahead, and took a look at it. There was just one place in the line, about three feet wide, where the water rushed down like a sluiceway; and we must go in there. On one side of this passage, a thin spur of black stone rose above the surface, and made a good mark to steer by; but on the other side of the sluice was a great round stone, covered with