soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and people might see me and hail me.  I got out amongst the driftwood, and then laid down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float.  I laid there, and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky; not a cloud in it.  The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before.  And how far a body can hear on the water such nights!  I heard people talking at the ferry landing. I heard what they said, too--every word of it.  One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now.  T'other one said _this_ warn't one of the short ones, he reckoned--and then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again; then they waked up another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh; he ripped out something brisk, and said let him alone.  The first fellow said he 'lowed to tell it to his old woman--she would think it was pretty good; but he said that warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time. I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight wouldn't wait more than about a week longer.  After that the talk got further and further away, and I couldn't make out the words any more; but I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a long ways off. I was away below the ferry now.  I rose up, and there was Jackson's Island, about two mile and a half down stream, heavy timbered and standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like a steamboat without any lights.  There warn't any signs of the bar at the head--it was all under water now. It didn't take me long to get there.  I shot past the head at a ripping rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and landed on the side towards the Illinois shore.  I run the canoe into a deep dent in the bank that I knowed about; I had to part the willow branches to get in; and when I m