“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again within a few hours.”

“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”

“And think so?”

He dipped his hand in the water over the boat's gunwale, and said, smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me: —

“Ay, I s'pose I think so, dear boy.

We'd be puzzled to be more quiet and easy-going than we are at present. But — it's a flowing so soft and pleasant through the water, p'raps, as makes me think it — I was a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the bottom of the next few hours than