The rafts come down the river when they please. They look about as easy to manœuvre as an ice-house, but the flannel-shirted lumbermen who operate them, two to a raft, seem unconcerned, and scull away at their long “sweeps,” in the apparently hopeless task of keeping their clumsy craft off the shallows. With the breaking up of the ice, stray logs, escaped from the holding booms, come down stream. The moment the ice-cakes are out of the river, even before, you begin to notice shabby old row-boats tied up and waiting at the mouth of every stream and “guzzle”; and as soon as a log whirls down amongst the confusion of ice, you will see boats put out, perhaps with a couple of boys, or else some old humped-up fellow, in a coat green with age, rowing cross-handed, nosing out like an old pickerel watching for minnows. The logs that are missed drift about till they are water-logged, when they sink little by little, and at last become what are known as “tide-waiters,” or “tide-rollers,” _i.e._ snags drifting above, or resting partly on, the bottom, a menace to vessels.
There are holding booms at different turns of the river, with odd shabby little house-boats for the rafts-men moored beside them; and what are these called but _gundalows_, an old, old “Down-east” corruption of _gondola_; whether in derision, or in ignorance, is not now known. Sometimes they are fitted up with some coziness, perhaps with white curtains and a little fresh paint, and I have even seen geraniums at their windows.
Another brand-new schooner, the _William D’Arcy_, tied up at our lumber wharf this last spring, and lay there for nearly a week. We all went on board her. She lay at the sheltered side of the wharf, out of the cold wind, and the sun poured down on her. The smell of salt and cordage was so strong that you could almost feel the lift of her bows to the swell, but there she lay, as quiet as if she had never lifted to a wave at all. The men were at work at various jobs; no one was in a hurry; it plainly made no difference whether they were two days at the wharf or ten.
The bulwarks and outside fittings, anchors, hawsers, and hawse-holes, seemed wonderfully large to our landsman eyes, and the inside fittings, lockers, etc., as wonderfully small and compact. The enormous masts were of new yellow Oregon pine.