with ripple marks, and strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles
and fish, all as white and dry as if they had been expertly cured.
We had been careful not to mar the freshness of the place, although
we often swam to it on summer evenings and lay on the sand to rest.

This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were
reasons why I should remember it better than any of the others.
Next week the other boys were to file back to their old places in
the Sandtown High School, but I was to go up to the Divide to teach
my first country school in the Norwegian district. I was already
homesick at the thought of quitting the boys with whom I had always
played; of leaving the river, and going up into a windy plain that
was all windmills and cornfields and big pastures; where there was
nothing wilful or unmanageable in the landscape, no new islands,
and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as often followed the
watercourses.

Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or
skating, but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we
were friends mainly because of the river. There were the two
Hassler boys, Fritz and Otto, sons of the little German tailor.
They were the youngest of us; ragged boys of ten and twelve, with
sunburned hair, weather-stained faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto,
the elder, was the best mathematician in school, and clever
at his books, but he always dropped out in the spring term as if
the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz caught the
fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they lived
so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the river
itself.