I hadn't laid there long, when I felt a twitch as if something
mighty big was medlin' with the other end of the string. I started up
and undertook to pull in, but you might as well undertake to drag an
elephant with a thread. I couldn't move him a hair. Pretty soon the
boat began to move up the lake in a way I didn't at all like. At first
it went may be three miles an hour, then five, ten, twenty, forty,
sixty miles the hour, round and round the lake, as if hurled along by
a million of locomotives. We went skiving around among the islands,
into the bays, along the shore, away out across the lake, crossing and
re-crossing in every direction; and if there's a place about this lake
we didn't visit, I should like to have somebody tell me where it is.
You may think it made my hair stand out some, to find myself flyin'
about like a streak of chain lightnin', and to see the trees and rocks
flyin' like mad the other way. I tried to untie the line, but it was
drawn into a knot so hard, that the old Nick himself couldn't move it.
I looked for my knife to cut it, but it had, somehow, got overboard in
our flight, besides flyin' about at the rate of sixty mile an hour,
kept a fellow pretty busy holdin' on, keepin' his place in the boat.
"After an hour or two we came to a pause, and the old feller that was
towin' me about, walked up to the surface, and stickin' his head out
of the water, 'Good mornin',' says he, in a very perlite sort of way.
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