"Ain't we ever going to hear about the burning?" laughingly whimpered the girl, but the narrator kept on: "In 'twenty-one I built the _Shepherdess_----" Ramsey all at once revived. "And did the _Shepherdess_ outrun the _Charioteer_?" "A trifle, yes." "Humph!" she said to herself, and twice again, on a higher key and with a grimace at Hugh, "humph!" "But in 'twenty-five the _Charioteer_ was run into and sunk, and the Hayle boat that came next," continued the historian, "was the best ever seen till then on these waters, of the hundred and sixty-five steamers launched." "Yes," said Madame Hayle, "and the firz' boat what my 'usband was captain." Ramsey started wildly. "The _Admiral_!" she cried at Hugh. She whisked round on his grandfather. "And then--to beat the _Admiral_--you built----?" "My son built--the _Abbess_." "And did the _Abbess_ beat the _Admiral_?" "Not for a long time. But in 'thirty-three the _Conqueror's_ very first run broke the _Abbess's_ record." But madame was not to be outdone in generosity. "Ah, yes," she cried, "but that same day the _Quakerezz_ she beat the _Conqueror_!" At which the teased Ramsey, suddenly seeing that all this was but a roundabout peacemaking where she could discern no strife, laughed herself so limp that she all but tumbled into old Joy's lap. "That's where we began!" she commented. "True," said the old man to her mother, "but in 'thirty-eight came your husband's _Chevalier_----" "Came--yes! only to get beat racing yo'"--the name eluded her---- "_Ambassadress_," prompted Ramsey. "Everybody knows about that--'way back in the country--even the dates. The _Ambassadress_ beat the _Chevalier_, the Autocrat beat the _Ambassadress_, the _Empress_ beat the _Autocrat_, the _Regent_ beat the _Empress_, te tum, te tum, te tum! Didn't the _Quakeress_ ever burn up, after all?" "Ramsey----" "Oh, well! this forever sitting silent! I----!" "Ramsey!----" X PERIL Ramsey clutched the old man's arm, pressed curls and brow against it, and laughed in a rillet of pure silver. Hugh bore it, sitting silent, while the great boat, so humanly alive and aglow in every part, ceaselessly breathed above and quivered below, and the ruffling breeze as ceaselessly confirmed her unflagging speed. The mere "catalogue of the ships" had lighted in him a secret glow that persisted. In his roused imagination the long pageant of the rival steamers still moved on through the rudely thronging, ever-multiplying fleet of the boundless valley's yearly swelling commerce, ocean-distant from all disparaging contrasts of riper empires; moved, yeasting, ruffling, through forty years of a civilization's genesis, each new boat, Hayle or Courteney, more beautifully capable than her newest senior, and each, in her time and degree, as cloud-white by day, as luminous by night, and as rife with human purpose and human hazards as this incomparable _Votaress_.