When I say we settled this or that, I do not mean that we planned
anything with any confidence as to what might happen an hour hence. So
much had happened in one night, and such great changes had been violently
and suddenly made in the fortunes of many among us, that we had got
better used to uncertainty, in a little while, than I dare say most
people do in the course of their lives.
The difficulties we soon got into, through the off-settings and point-
currents of the stream, made the likelihood of our being drowned,
alone,--to say nothing of our being retaken--as broad and plain as the
sun at noonday to all of us. But, we all worked hard at managing the
rafts, under the direction of the seamen (of our own skill, I think we
never could have prevented them from oversetting), and we also worked
hard at making good the defects in their first hasty construction--which
the water soon found out. While we humbly resigned ourselves to going
down, if it was the will of Our Father that was in Heaven, we humbly made
up our minds, that we would all do the best that was in us.
And so we held on, gliding with the stream. It drove us to this bank,
and it drove us to that bank, and it turned us, and whirled us; but yet
it carried us on.
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