of our mountain hurricanes. A small boy, then, and with only the rope he had hugged his way up on, to cling to, the pitching and lurching of the sloop, which was all but upset with every blast, threw him about like the knot on the end of a whip-lash, and disturbed his breakfast. But his nearest approach to "giving over breathing with a job half done," was in trying to get up a barrel of salt shad from the bottom of the river. He had been sent with another young man, by his "boss," to take it to a customer, in a boat, and they had accidentally rolled it overboard in deep soundings. It was in the early spring, "before the water was any way pleasant," but he off with everything but his trowsers, tied a rope round his waist, and dived—the other young man agreeing to pull him up when he should telegraph by a kick that he had got hold. A barrel of fish is heavy thing to lift, under water or out of it, but he got hold of the two ends; and then the trouble was to wait to be pulled up. He hung on, though it was awkward landing it, even after he got it to the top. How near drowning he was, of course he don't now know. He would not care to be any nearer to it, however, for that money's worth of fish.
We had some lesser gossip about snakes and drift-timber, ice-cracks and snow-floods, and then we got Ward upon experiences that will be of more interest to the public at large—his winter-pilotings of the steamboats that
