ecause her father
was a hero and her mother a saint. The squire's brother-in-law had
assured her that her brothers, all three--as Southern boys always, or
almost always, did--would come out all right--every way; but on being
asked for details he had slipped away to give his De Bow to the
commodore and his last good-by to Hugh.

The actor and his wife, however, were as broad awake as Watson. Loving
the lone starry hours for the hours' own starry sake and having for Hugh
and Ramsey a certain zeal unconfessed even to each other, they were yet
in view from the pilot's wheel and visitors' bench at this hour of
eleven, staying up as willingly as nightingales with the young husband
and wife who had agreed with them that somebody's mental radius
"certain'y had" lengthened as suddenly as her gown.

This young pair were expecting to go ashore within the next half-hour at
"New Carthage," a city of seven houses, nearly opposite another of equal
pride called Palmyra, and some four miles above the head of Hurricane
Island, whose foot the _Votaress_ was then passing. They and the
Gilmores were still down at the forward edge of the texas roof, the
players finding the Carthaginians very attractive: fluent on morals,
cuisine, manners, steamboats, the turf, fashions, the chase; voluble on
the burdensomeness of the slave to his master, the blessedness of the
master to his slave; but sore to the touch on politics and
religion--with their religion quite innocently adjusted to their
politics--and promptly going hard aground on any allusion to history,
travel, the poets, statistics, architecture, ornithology, art, music,
myths, memoirs, Europe, Asia, Africa, homoeopathy, or phrenology. It
entertained the players just to see how many things the happy lovers
knew nothing about and to hear them state in some new form, each time
they backed off a sand-bar of their own ignorance, that they had seen
the world, sucked the orange, yet found no spot of earth so perfect to
live in as New Carthage.

The briefest sittings at such entertainment had been enough for Hugh,
too much for Ramsey, and had driven them back, twice and thrice, to that
fairer world on high in the pilot-house, where they could study the
river undistracted. There and thence, now together, now apart, they had
gone and come all through Watson's watch, moved by Hugh's duties or her
caprice. Their each new meeting had been by accident, but it is odd how
often accidents can occur--"at th