"Dat's right, honey--ol' 'oman--dat's right. _You_ pray an' _I'll_ pray--an' we'll _watch_ wid _faith_. An' ef Gord don't sen' Marse Harol', He'll git a message to us some way, so we'll be guided." The sound of a horn from across the river put an end to the conversation. Some one was blowing for the ferryman. "PITY you tied _Wood-duck_ up so soon to-night," said the old wife, following Israel with her eyes as she spoke, while he rose slowly and taking the oars down from the rafters started to the river. In a moment the old man's answering horn sounded clear and loud in response, and the clank of the chain as it dropped in the bow of the skiff, followed by the rhythmic sound of the oar-locks, told his listening mate that the ferryman was on his way. II Besides plying the ferry-skiff at which Israel earned odd dimes--every day a few--he turned many an honest penny with his shrimp-nets. The rafts of logs chained together at the landing were his, and constituted the initial station of a driftwood industry which was finally expressed in the long piles of wood which lay stacked in cord measures on either side of the cabin. The low and prolonged talk of the old people to-night had been exceptional only in its intensity. The woman's reluctant almost despair of a forlorn hope was pathetic indeed. Still it was but momentary. They had gone over the same ground many times before, and fear and even foreboding had occasionally clouded their vision in reviewing the situation. The woman's observation in regard to the child's growing tall was the first suggestion to Israel's mind of the urgency of immediate relief. In the stress of material provision, men may be forgiven if they sometimes overlook life's abstract values. Israel was so startled by this new thought that when he had rowed his boat out into the clearing which the broad river afforded, he involuntarily pressed the handles of his oars, lifting their blades from the water, while he turned his eyes in one direction and another and then upward. He had a hard problem to solve. Here was a great thinking space, and yet, although he stopped for the length of several strokes, and the night was mild and still,--although every condition was favorable for clear thought,--his mind seemed lost in a sort of maze, and it was only when he discovered by a familiar landmark that he was drifting fast down-stream, only with this obtrusion of the actual, that he rallied quickly, and with a deft stroke or two recovered his course. And as the oar-locks measured time again he chuckled: "I got my lesson, yas, I got my lesson. _Work!_ Dat 's my po'tion. Quick as I gits biggoty and tries to read above my head, I goes de downward way." He said it aloud, to himself, and the words gave him renewed energy, for, even as he spoke, the _Duck_, with oars for wings, plunged lightly forward over the water to a quickened measure. * * * * *