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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
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