cumstances we hardly need begrudge a line or two more to
tell how, as far back as Delta, the _Votaress_ had begun to meet the
Louisville Saturday evening packets and to receive and return their
special salutes. One was a Hayle boat and one a Courteney. Such moments
were refreshing. Inquiry and information flowed through them as
naturally and beguilingly as a brook through a meadow and gave Hugh
opportunity to contemplate incidentally the play of air and light in
Ramsey's curls without her having the slightest suspicion of him!--gave
her chances to ply him with questions in autobiography and social
casuistry and to enjoy keenly the ridiculous majesty of his eyes and
voice, while the two dear chaperons talked apart as obliviously as if
she were merely asking him how deep the whiskey was in Whiskey Chute.

In the long run from Commerce to Norfolk came breakfast. Commerce was
another case of infant-city still-birth, Norfolk was less. Breakfast,
double-ranked, stoop-shouldered, mute: beefsteak and fried onions its
solar centre, with hot rolls for planets; Hugh at the ladies' table, the
first clerk at the gentlemen's. Then the boiler deck, toothpicks,
cigars, breezes, armchairs, spittoons, the sad news of the two deaths
up-stairs, the ugly news of the five passengers set ashore and the
reason thereof. Men spat straight and hard as they heard or told the
latter item, yet with tacit unanimity awaited the re-emergence of the
still secluded senator, general, and twins.

By Hugh's unsmiling forethought Madame Hayle, Ramsey, and the Gilmores
breakfasted in the pilot-house. With "Harriet" close to her elbow,
Ramsey ate at a window, standing, to watch the gliding shores and floods
and privily cross-examine, again in autobiography and at printing-press
speed, the willing maid-servant. At Island Fifty-Two another boat, the
_Shooting Star_, streamed by. At a plantation and wood-yard the
_Votaress_ paused to restock with dairy and kitchen-garden supplies and
to lash to her either side a thirty-cord wood flat, and now swept on
with the foam twenty feet broad at the square front of each while the
deck-hands trotted aboard under their great shoulder loads by one narrow
hook plank and came leaping back for more, and the loaders and pilers
chanted and chorussed:

"Oh, Shan-a-do'e, I loves yo' daught-eh--
Ah! ha! roll-in' riveh!--
Oh, ef she don't love me she'd ought teh--
Ah! ha!... bound away!... faw de wile .