In point of fact, the weed was so thick and so firmly matted together that I almost could walk on it; and when I had knocked loose a couple of doors from their hinges and had thrown them overboard--taking two, so that I might move one ahead of the other as my cutting advanced--I had firm enough standing place from which I could slash away. So tough was the mass that I was a whole day in uncovering a space less than forty feet long by twenty broad; and when my launching-pool was finished it had the look of a little pond in a meadow surrounded by solid banks. All this showed me that even with the screw to push while I cleared a way for the boat's passage I should have my hands full; but it also put into my head a notion that helped me a good deal in the end. This was to rig on the straight stem of my boat a set of guide-bars projecting forward in which I could work perpendicularly a cross-cut saw, and in that way to cut a slit in the weed--which would be widened by the boat's nose thrusting into it as the screw shoved her onward, and so would enable me to squeeze along. And as this was a matter easy of accomplishment--being only to double over a couple of iron bars so that there would be a slit a half inch wide for the saw to travel in, and to bolt them fast to the top and bottom of the boat's stem--I did it immediately; and it worked so well when I came to try it that I was glad enough that I had had so lucky a thought. Indeed, had I known how well it would turn out I should have gone a step farther and rigged my saw to run by steam power--setting up a frame in the bows to hold a wheel carrying a pin on which the saw could play and to which I could make fast a bar from my piston-rod--and in that way saved myself from the longest bit of back-breaking work that ever I had to do. But that was a piece of foresight that came afterward, and so did me no good. When my guide-bars were in place, and the saw made ready to slip into them by taking off one of its handles--and I had still a spare saw to fall back upon in the event of the first one breaking--my boat was ready to go overboard into the open water, where she would lie while I put aboard of her my coal and stores. But the work that was before me, as I thus came close to it, loomed up very large; and so did the doubts which beset me as to how my voyage would end. Indeed, it was in a spirit far from exultant that at last I cut the lashings which held the cradle; and then with the tackle that I had ready got the heavy mass started--and in a couple of minutes had my boat safely overboard and floating free, as the cradle sunk away from under her, carried down by its lading of iron bars.