Yes what I am trying to accomplish is like example #4 except without the visible cursor, and each character gets printed at col 15 before it gets scrolled (in the example they are printing the character at col 7 or 8).
If you really want to find out what is going on then follow the LCD Addressing link at http://web.alfredstate.edu/weimandn.
That was very helpful in understanding the guts of things, although I had assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that the LiquidCrystal library would take care of the sausage making, so to speak.
I was particularly excited to see that the first line of memory ends on 27, since that is the point at which my display seems to print the next character on the 2nd line, until I realized that it was 0x27, not decimal 27.
In any case, it gives me some place to start and some things to think about.