"The baby, on the other hand, was momentarily expecting that the bear
would come over and bite her. Why else, if not from some such sinister
motive, had he come aboard her raft, when he had been traveling on a
perfectly good tree? The tree looked so much more interesting than her
bare raft, on which she had been voyaging for over an hour, and of
which she was now heartily tired. To be sure, the bear was not much
bigger than her own Teddy Bear at home, which she was wont to carry
around by one leg, or to spank without ceremony whenever she thought it
needed discipline. But the glossy black of the stranger was quite
unlike the wild and grubby whiteness of her Teddy, and his shrewd
little twinkling eyes were quite unlike the bland shoe buttons which
adorned the face of her uncomplaining pet. She wondered when her
mother would come and relieve the strain of the situation.
"All at once the raft, which had hitherto voyaged with a discreet
deliberation, seemed to become agitated. Boiling upthrusts of the
current, caused by some hidden unevenness on the bottom, shouldered it
horridly from beneath, threatening to tear it apart, and unbridled
eddies twisted it this way and that with sickening lurches.
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