Tempest shattered,
Floating waste and desolate."

"Well, Piron, as I have told you, after the peace was made in 1815, I
had command of a brig, and took a cruise on the coast of Brazil. After
that I was appointed to a thirty-six gun frigate--the old 'Blazer'--and
went, for three years, to the East Indies, and round home by the
Pacific. When we were paid off I made a tour in Europe with that boy's
father, Dr. Darcantel, and--"

"But you promised to tell me, Cleveland, something about him."

"Nothing easier; and, if we have half an hour before we get to
Escondido, I will give you all I know, in a general way, of his history.
Yes? Well, then, Darcantel is descended from one of the oldest and best
Creole families in our State of Louisiana, and the plantations of my
family and his father were contiguous to each other on the Mississippi,
some leagues up the coast above New Orleans. We had the same tutor when
we were children, and we grew up from infancy to boyhood together. He
was passionate and ungovernable even as a child; but as he was the heir
to a large estate, and his father dead, his weak mother humored and
allowed no one to curb him. I myself, one of a numerous family, was put
in the navy, and I went away on cruise after cruise, and did not get
home again to the old plantation for full seven years. I was a man then,
had seen some active service, and I held a commission as a lieutenant in
the navy.

"In the mean while, Paul Darcantel, who had taken, at the time I left, a
strong fancy for medicine and surgery, had been sent to France to begin
his studies. How he applied himself we do not know; but with a large
letter of credit he spent a great deal of money; and we heard that, with
great talents and wonderful skill in his profession, he was yet unfitted
for close application, and plunged madly into the vortex of dissipation
around him. I heard, too--or at least my brothers told me--that his
extravagances had seriously impaired his fortune, and that his duels
had been so numerous and desperate as to make his name dreaded even in
Paris. On one occasion, at a cafe, he had cut a bullying hussar's head
clean off with his own sabre for knocking a woman down; and in another
duel, where he had detected a French count cheating him at cards, he
shot his nose off for a bet. With this unenviable reputation, and at the
urgent solicitations of his agent, after years of absence he returned to
his ancestral home.