Must be a dam. Look how straight it is."
"How on earth," called Ethel Blue, "are we going to get over it?"
"Jump up it the way Grandpa told me the salmon fishes do," volunteered
Dicky.
Everybody laughed, but Mr. Emerson declared that was just about what
they were going to do. The boat headed in for one end of the dam and her
passengers soon found themselves floating in a granite room, with huge
wooden doors closed behind them. The water began to boil around them,
and as it poured into the lock from unseen channels the boat rose
slowly. In a little while the Ethels cried that they could see over the
tops of the walls, and in a few minutes more another pair of big gates
opened in front of them and they glided into another chamber and out
into the river again, this time above the "falls."
"I feel as if I had been through the Panama Canal," declared Ethel Blue.
"That's just the way its huge locks work," said Mrs. Morton. "The next
time your Uncle Roger has a furlough I hope it will be long enough for
us to go down there and see it."
"I wonder," asked Roger, "if there are many more dams like this on the
Monongahela."
"There's one about every ten miles," volunteered the steersman. "Until
the government put them in only small boats could go up the river. Now
good sized ones can go all the way to Wheeling, West Virginia.
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