Podge fled from his side with alarm; he saw her handkerchief staunching her tears, and people watching her as she nearly ran along the sidewalk. "Jericho! Jerichoo! Jer--" Duff Salter did not finish the sneeze, but with a long face called for a boat and rower to take him across to Treaty Island. Podge arrived at school just as the bell was ringing, and, still in nervousness and tears, took her place in her division while the Bible was read. She saw the principal's eye upon her as she took off her bonnet and moistened her face, and the boys looked up a minute or two inquiringly, but soon relapsed to their individual selfishness. When the glass sashes dividing the rooms were closed and the recitations began, the lapping sound of the river started anew. A film grew on her eyes, and in it appeared the distant Jersey and island shore, with the uncertain boundary of point, cove, and marsh, like a misty cold line, cheerless and void of life or color, as it was every day, yet standing there as if it merely came of right and was the river's true border, and was not to be hated as such. Podge strained to look through the illusion, and walked down the aisle once, where it seemed to be, and touched the plaster of the wall. She had hardly receded when it reappeared, and all between it and her mind was merely empty river, wallowing and lapping and sucking and subsiding, as if around submerged piers, or wave was relieving wave from the weight of floating things like rafts, or logs, or buoys, or bodies. Into this wide waste of muddy ripples every sound in the school-room swam, and also sights and colors, till between her eye-lash and that filmy distant margin nothing existed but a freshet, alive yet with nothing, eddying around with purposeless power, and still moving onward with an under force. The open book in her hand appeared like a great white wharf, or pier, covered with lime and coal in spots and places, and pushed forward into this hissing, rippling, exclaiming deluge, which washed its base and spread beyond. Podge could barely read a question in the book, and the sound of her voice was like gravel or sand pushed off the wharf into the river and swallowed there. She thought she heard an answer in a muddy tone and gave the question out again, and there seemed to be laughter, as if the waters, or what was drowned in them, chuckled and purled, going along. She raised her eyes above the laughers, and there the boundary line of Jersey stood defined, and all in front of it was the drifting Delaware. It seemed to her that boys were darting to and fro and swapping seats, and one boy had thrown a handful of beans. She walked down the aisle as if into water, wading through pools and waves of boys, who plashed and gurgled around her. She walked back again, and a surf of boys was thrown at her feet. The waters rose and licked and spilled and flowed onward again. Podge felt a sense of strangling, as if going down, in a hollow