le stretched across the river, fastened on the south bank to a post
set deep in the earth, and flanked by an abutment of sandstone, and on
the north bank wound round a huge elm that stood by the road within a
dozen yards of the river.

On this cable the boat ran, fastened with wire ropes and two pulleys, a
sort of long, flat barge that would carry thirty cattle. The spanning
cable made a great curve down the river, so that the strength of the
current was almost sufficient to force the barge across, striking it
obliquely against the dip of the wire. How the current could be made to
do this work was to me one of the mysteries, but it did do it, guided
and helped by the ferrymen. I have wondered at it a hundred times as I
sat under El Mahdi's nose with my feet dangling over the side of the
boat.

We stopped on the slope where the boat landed.

Jud threw back his shoulders and shouted; and someone answered from the
other side, "Who-ee!" a call that is said to reach farther than any
other human sound. It came high up over the water, clear enough, but as
from a great distance. There were no bells at the crossings in this
land. Every man carried a voice in his throat that could reach half a
mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs.

The two sons of old Jonas Horton maintained the ferry as their father
had done before them. It was an inheritance, and it was something more
than this. It was a trust, a family distinction, like a
title,--something which they were born into, as a Hindoo is born into
his father's trade. If they had been ousted from this ferry, they would
have felt themselves as hopelessly wronged as the descendants of an old
house driven from their baronial estate.

The two, Mart and Danel, lived with the mother, a flat, withered old
woman, in a log house by the river. They were tall, raw-boned, serious
men, rarely leaving the river, and at such times hurrying back uneasy.
Their faces at the church or in the village were anxious, as of one who
leaves his house closed with a fire roaring in the chimney; or better,
perhaps, of some fearful child who has stolen away from his daily
everlasting task. Sometimes the mother would say, "There is no meal in
the barrel," or, "You're drinking the last of the coffee;" and they
would look at each other across the table, troubled, as men dire beset
called upon to decrease the forces of a garrison. Then one would set out
with a bag on his shoulder, throwing his long body