es and "California"
smiled--behind Ramsey: such a different, surpassingly different Ramsey!

Near the _Enchantress's_ bell these four and old Joy were gathered about
Gideon Hayle, Watson, and Hugh Courteney--such an inspiringly different
Hugh! Two or three showed a divided attention, letting an occasional
glance stray down the waters ahead, where Old Town Bend swung from west
to south.

At the same moment, in Horseshoe Cut-off, some twelve or fifteen miles
below, another swift, handsome steamer, upward bound--the great river
could hardly yet show more than one handsomer--swept into the north from
an easterly course under Island Sixty-four and pointed up the middle of
the stream to pass between Sixty-three and Sixty-two where, at the head
of the reach, they parted the river into three channels and widened it
to more than a league. She would have been an animating sight if only
for the fact that every soul aboard who was not just then engaged in
running her was at the guards of one or another of her graceful decks.
The forecastle was darkened by her crew standing in a half circle about
the capstan, her larboard pantry guards were crowded with white-jackets,
her roofs were gay with ladies and children. In elated oblivion of the
charming picture presented by their own boat and themselves, all were
awaiting a spectacle which their pilots and captain had said would
surely be met within the next hour's run.

Although behind them was a tortuous fifty miles in which hardly more
signs of human life had been seen or heard than if their way had been on
the open Atlantic, the beauty of the wilderness alone, transfigured in
the lights of the declining day, might well have satisfied the eye. A
red sun was just touching the horizon. Its beams and the blue shadows
that divided them lay level, miles long, athwart the glassy stream and
its green and gray forests and tapered and vanished in a low eastern
haze. The tints of autumn already prevailed along the shores, and the
indolent waters mirrored the reversed images of the two islands in
outlines clearer than their own and from bank to bank took on in
enriched hues the many colors of the sky. At the far end of the reach,
between and somewhat beyond the islands, stood well out of the shrunken
flood a sand-bar, its middle crested green and gold with young poplars
and willows, all its ill favor made picturesque and the whole mass
glorified by the sunset. By this bar the waters of the centr