a comfortable warmth
spread over his whole system, and then began a burning sensation in his
stomach. To extinguish this fire he drank again. Fire within, and fire
without,--flame upon flame,--was this the way that he was to live in
future?

Then began a life of toil, hardship, and drunkenness that lasted three
years:--three years whose seasons were all alike in that heated room
down in the bowels of that big ship.

He sailed from country to country; he heard their names, Italian,
French, and Spanish, but of them all he saw nothing. The fairer the
climes they visited, the hotter was his chamber of torment. When he had
emptied his cinders, broken his coal, and filled his furnaces, he slept
the sleep of exhaustion and intoxication; for a stoker must drink if he
lives. In the darkness of his life there was but one bright spot, his
mother. She was like the Madonna in a chapel where all the lights are
extinguished save the one that burns before her shrine. Now that he had
become a man, much of the mystery of her life had become clear to him.
His respect for Charlotte was changed to tender pity, and he loved her
as we love those for whom we suffer. Even in his most despairing moments
he remembered the end for which he toiled, and a mechanical instinct
made him carefully preserve almost every sou of his wages.

Meanwhile, distance and time weakened the intercourse between mother and
son. Jack's letters became more and more rare. Those of Charlotte were
frequent, but they spoke of things so foreign to his new life, that
he read them only to hear their music, the far off echo of a living
tenderness.

Letters from Etiolles told him of D'Argenton; later, some from Paris
spoke of their having again taken up their residence there, and of the
poet having founded a Review, in consequence of the solicitations of
friends. This would be a way of bringing his works prominently before
the public, as well as to increase his income. At Havana Jack found a
large package addressed to him. It was the first number of the magazine.
The stoker mechanically turned its leaves, leaving on them the traces of
his blackened fingers; and suddenly, as he saw the well-known names of
D'Argenton, Moronval, and Hirsch on the smooth pages, he was seized
with wild rage and indignation, and he cried aloud, as he shook his fist
impatiently in the air, "Wretches, wretches! what have you made of me?"

This emotion was but brief; day by day his intellect weake