gnolia_. To
be either was to be famous. The next moment she swept into view on the
island's sunward side, as pre-eminent in all the scene as though the sun
were gone and she were the rising moon. The moon was not her equal in
the eyes of those beholders. On every deck, from forecastle to after
hurricane roof, there were big spots of vivid color, red, green, blue,
never seen in the moon and which were quickly made out to be a
high-piled freight of ploughs, harrows, horse-mills, carts, and wagons
destined for the ever-widening Southern fields of corn and cotton, sugar
and rice. The passenger with the pocket spy-glass--there is always
one--proclaimed that her boiler deck was hung full--as no deck of the
moon ever is--of the finest spoils of the hunt: geese, swan, venison,
and bear; while the nakedest eye could see at a glance that from forward
gangway to sternmost guard her bull railings were up, and a closer
scrutiny revealed that the main load of her freight deck was every
farm-bred sort of living four-footed beast: horses, mules, beeves, cows,
swine, and sheep. She did not pass near though unaware of the distress
she avoided; but in courtly exaggeration she sent across the intervening
mile a double salute, white plumes of sunlit steam from her whistle--the
new mode--and the gentler voice of her bell, the older form. The course
of the _Votaress_ lay on the island's eastern side, and the hail and
response of the two crafts had hardly ceased to echo from the various
shores, or hats to wave and handkerchiefs to flutter, when the flood
between them began to widen, a thousand feet to the half minute, and
they parted.

At the same time, from the middle of the boiler deck floated a sound
ordinarily most welcome but at this time a distasteful surprise: the
dinner-bell again. Not with festal din, however, it called, but with
each solitary note drawn out through a full second or more,
church-steeple fashion, and with a silken veil tied on its tongue to
give each stroke a solemn softness and illusion of distance. Small
wonder that the most of the company, just risen from "a plumb bait,"
turned that way and stared, seeing old Joy, with joyless face, tolling
out the notes in persistent monotone while in front of her stood the
Gilmores at either side of a chair, and on the chair, also standing, the
daughter of Gideon Hayle. With her hands and eyes fastened upon a
written notice and with the bell tolling steadily at her back she
tremb