forward at each step
and dangling his arms, hurrying as though he ought not to take the time.

Presently the boat crept towards us out of the water, swung down swiftly
and ground its nose in the bank. The two ferrymen were bareheaded, in
their brown homespun coats. They had possibly been at supper, and turned
around on their bench to answer through the open door. They inquired if
we all wished to be set over, and we rode on to the boat for answer. The
man in the bow reached up and caught the cable with a sort of iron
wrench, and began to pull. The other took a pole lying by the horses'
feet, thrust it against the bank and forced the boat out into the water.
Then he also took a wrench from his pocket, and when his brother,
walking down the length of the barge from bow to stern, reached the end,
he caught the cable and followed, so that the pull on the wire was
practically continuous.

The warm south wind blew stiffly in our faces and the horses shifted
their feet uneasily. If the Valley River was ugly from its bank it was
uglier from its middle. It tugged at the boat as though with a thousand
clinging fingers, and growled and sputtered, and then seemed to quit it
for a moment and whisper around the oak boards like invisible
conspirators taking counsel in a closet. A scholar on that water nursing
his sallow face in the trough of his hand would have fallen a-brooding
on the grim boatman crossing to the shore that none may leave, or the
old woman of the Sanza, poling her ghostly, everlasting raft; and had he
listened, he could have heard the baying of the three-mouthed hound
arousing the wardens of the Vedic Underworld to their infernal watching
by that water we all must cross.

I think the hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate
they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink
or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to
ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He
inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was answered
that they had not.

Then he began to hum a hoary roundelay about the splendid audacity of
old Mister Haystack and his questionable adventures, set to an
unprintable refrain of "Winktum bolly mitch-a-kimo," or some such jumble
of words. I have never heard this song in the mouth of any other man. He
must have found it somewhere among the dusty trumpery of forgotten old
folk-lyrics, and when he sang i