The river looked miles and miles across.  The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and _smelt_ late. You know what I mean--I don't know the words to put it in. I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start when I heard a sound away over the water.  I listened.  Pretty soon I made it out.  It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night.  I peeped out through the willow branches, and there it was--a skiff, away across the water.  I couldn't tell how many was in it.  It kept a-coming, and when it was abreast of me I see there warn't but one man in it.  Think's I, maybe it's pap, though I warn't expecting him.  He dropped below me with the current, and by and by he came a-swinging up shore in the easy water, and he went by so close I could a reached out the gun and touched him.  Well, it _was_ pap, sure enough--and sober, too, by the way he laid his oars. I didn't lose no time.  The next minute I was a-spinning down stream soft but quick in the shade of the bank.  I made two mile and a half, and then struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of the river, because pretty 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