In this resource he experienced a surcease of the harassments that infested his life on shore. His skipper knew little and cared less of land-lubber interests--as maritime an animal as a crab. He had, indeed, with a brightening eye and a ready courtesy, asked, when Floyd-Rosney came over the side of the _Aglaia_, if the madam was not going to favor the ship’s company with her presence. Being answered shortly in the negative he heartily protested his regret. “The best sailor she is of any lady I ever saw,” he declared, and added that if they were to do some deep-sea stunts they need not consult the barometer for weather signs. She cared no more for weather than a stormy petrel. He always looked on the madam’s presence as a good omen, he said; he had a bit of the blarney and a bit of poesy in his composition, his ancestry hailing from the Emerald Isle. “She has brought no good luck to her husband,” Floyd-Rosney reflected, grimly. It was grateful to him, however, to perceive that the man knew naught of his recent discomfitures and humiliation; of very meager consequence such an opinion would have been ordinarily, but the evident ignorance of the skipper enabled him to hold his head higher. The skipper read nothing in the newspapers but the shipping news, and but for the change in Floyd-Rosney’s bibulous habit he might never have been the wiser. “He’s drinking like a fish,” he said in surprise to the second officer. “That’s new with him.” “Seems to me,” responded the subordinate, meditatively, “I heard something when we was in port in Boloxi about him and the madam havin’ had some sort o’ row.” “I hate to trust him with the brand new dinky skiff,” said the skipper. “He ain’t a practiced hand; I seen him run her nose up on a drift log lying on the levee with a shock that might have started every seam in her.” But the yacht, with all that appertained to it, was Floyd-Rosney’s property, and the skipper could only enjoy his fears for the proper care of its appurtenances. For Floyd-Rosney had contracted the habit of scouting about in the skiff, while the yacht swung at anchor, awaiting his pleasure. The solitude was soothing to his exacerbated nerves. He could, indeed, be alone, for he took the oars himself, and as he was a strong, athletic man the exercise was doubtless beneficial and tonic. The passing of the congestion of commerce from the great river to the railroads had brought the stream to an almost primitive loneliness. Thus he would often row for hours, seeing not a human being, not the smoke of a riverside habitation, not a craft of any of the multifarious species once wont to ply the waters of this great inland sea. The descriptive epithet was merited by its aspect at this stage of the water. Bank-full, it stretched as far as the eye could reach. Only persons familiar with the riparian contours could detect in a ruffled line on the horizon the presence of a growth of cottonwood on the swampy Arkansas shore.