One after one
But first he wanted to do a bit of thinking . To think the better , the better to collect his tired and scattered wits , he had stood his Winchester carefully upright between two spruce saplings , filled his pipe , lighted it with relish , and seated himself under the old birch where he could look straight down upon the wheeling logs in Blackwater Pot . It was while he was looking down into the terrible eddy that his efforts to think failed him and his pipe went out , and his interest in the fortunes of the captive logs gradually took the hold of a nightmare upon his overwrought imagination . One after one he would mark , snatched in by the capricious eddy and held back a little while from its doom . One after one he would see crowded out again , by inexplicable whim , and hurled on into the raging horror of the falls . He fell to personifying this captive log or that , endowing it with sentience , and imagining its emotions each time it circled shuddering past the cleft in the rim , once more precariously reprieved . At last , either because he was more deeply exhausted than he knew , or because he had fairly dropped asleep with his eyes open and his fantastic imaginings had slipped into a veritable dream , he felt himself suddenly become identified with one of the logs .