"Thirty-three," assented Ned. "Alias Flour Island; but _not_ Flow-er Island. Flour-ladened flatboats wrecked there in the days o' yo' grandfather, Eliphalet Hayle, whose own boats they might 'a' been, only Hayles ain't never been good at losin' boats. But his'n or not, _can_ you suspicion they wuz flow-er-ladened? Shucks! them that spell it that-a-way air jest as bad an' no wuss than them that stick _b_ onto Plum in Plum P'int an' pull the _y_ out o' Hayle fo' Hayle's P'int! They jest a-airin' they ignorance. Some fellers love to air they ignorance. I do, myself." He gave these facts of topography in reward of the grave interest that Hugh--elated interest that Ramsey--still seemed to take in all such items, as well as to allow them to infer that he had not noticed them betraying interest in anything more personal. "Hayle's P'int--" he resumed, and when Madame Hayle and old Joy roused and glanced around on him, while the senator and the general reappeared close by, looking back down the steamer's wake with military comments on the First Chickasaw Bluff, just left behind, he addressed them all as one. Hayle's Point, he persisted, was miles away yet and comparatively unimportant "considerin' its name," but the small cluster of houses on the Arkansas side up in the next bend was Osceola, where Plum Point Bars made the "wickedest" bit of river between Saint Louis and the Gulf; a bit that "killed" at least one steamboat every year. He said they were then passing a sand-bar, under water at this stage, which had been Island Thirty-two until "swallered whole" by the "big earthquake" of 1811. "Better'n forty year' ago, that was. Only quake ever felt in these parts, but so big that, right in the middle of all the b'ilin' an' staggerin' an' sinkin' down to Chiny, the Mis'sippi River give birth to her fust steamboat--an' saved it!" So he continued, egged on by the conviction that, over and above the intrinsic value of the facts, these conversational eddies outside the current of incident "a-happ'min' to 'em yit" helped forward his two most deeply interested hearers on that course erroneously supposed never to run smooth. Be that as it may, the two pilots' joint theory of maxims working as well backward as forward worked here; deep waters ran still. Love, that is, having broken intolerable bounds in one short fierce "chute" of declaration, was content to run deep and still and to give broad precedence to duties, sorrows, and courtesies. The pair noticeably drifted apart and conversed with others when others were quite willing they should drift together. Madame Hayle needed but a glance or so to perceive that something beautiful had happened in the spiritual experience of her daughter. By and by when the commodore and the Californian rejoined the group, Hugh and his grandfather spent a still moment looking into each other's eyes and when both gazes relaxed at once the story had been told and understood.