I'm going in the direction you've fully come to expect of... off to the tangenty left where no one else has gone or is likely too and completely in a direction other than the one so nicely pointed out by your end question.

On the St. Ives riddle (i've actually been thinking about that riddle the last two days from out of the blue), and it always got me because the book I first saw it in (a large tome with shiny teal binding and cover), they showed the lot in a what looked like to my mind, a boat or ferry. So I always wondered if they were getting on the ferry with the narrator or off the ferry as the narrator got on. And even if they were exiting, how many unnamed others got on to the ferry with the narrator, and if the narrator wasn't manning the ferry alone, how many staff members were there?

Clearly, I thought too much about it.