The heavy darkness of the early night hours was soon dispelled. Far to the eastward, the golden moon at the full came creeping up from behind a huge sand dune upon Core Banks. Its gentle luminousness fell over the expanse of water and showed the launch clearly as it voyaged toward the unknown.... And that same radiance shone upon a lover seeking wildly for the girl of his heart--and seeking in vain. CHAPTER XIII AMONG THE FISHERFOLK This night was not different from other nights along the western shores and estuaries of the Sound Country. For that matter, the people of the Hunting Quarter and Cedar Island section are not very greatly changed in their manners and customs from those of their forebears of many generations ago. Grouped in small settlements of just a few houses each, they live there to-day after the fashion of those same forebears in almost every detail. The houses are the same or at least they are carefully patterned after those built by the first settlers so many generations ago. There is no doubt concerning the ancestry of these folk. A little conversation with the natives is enough to make one realize that he is listening here to a speech redolent of the days of Chaucer, a speech richly flavored with the colloquialisms of the Elizabethan era. Some of the familiar folk-lore tales might well have emanated from the poet himself, both for their language and their spirit. And these descendants of an early English stock have preserved not only the ancient speech, but they have maintained the generous courtesy of a former time, when Sir Walter Raleigh spread his mantle in the mire in order that his queen might pass dry shod. And real courtesy includes always an unhesitating and ungrudging hospitality. The dwellers in this isolated region are surpassed by none in their warm welcome of any wayfarer who may come to them. They have no highway or railroad connection with the outside world. The only means is voyaging by small boats, a method necessarily slow at the best, and often quite impossible. It is claimed that good roads and the railways are essential factors in the education of any community, and the claim is, doubtless, just. But it would be well, perhaps, if some of those who boast of their education were to be cast among these illiterates, there to gain a new appreciation of their own language, shorn of its modern barbarities and the atrocities of slang. It is a curious fact that many of these persons who can neither read nor write, nevertheless, possess a vocabulary beyond that of many a grammar-school graduate. Schools have been few and far between in this lonely place. Yet the very isolation has tended to preserve the purity of the local speech.