e sleep, get over the time gayly enough. Steward,
another tumbler like the last; there--very good--that will do. Your good
health, Mr.--what was it you said?"

"O'Malley."

"O'Malley--your good health! Good-night." And so ended our brief colloquy,
and in a few minutes more, a very decisive snore pronounced my friend to be
fulfilling his precept for killing the hours.

I now made the effort to emancipate myself from my crib, and at last
succeeded in getting on the floor, where, after one _chassez_ at a small
looking-glass opposite, followed by a very impetuous rush at a little brass
stove, in which I was interrupted by a trunk and laid prostrate, I finally
got my clothes on, and made my way to the deck. Little attuned as was my
mind at the moment to admire anything like scenery, it was impossible to be
unmoved by the magnificent prospect before me. It was a beautiful evening
in summer; the sun had set above an hour before, leaving behind him in the
west one vast arch of rich and burnished gold, stretching along the whole
horizon, and tipping all the summits of the heavy rolling sea, as it rolled
on, unbroken by foam or ripple, in vast moving mountains, from the far
coast of Labrador. We were already in blue water, though the bold cliffs
that were to form our departing point were but a few miles to leeward.
There lay the lofty bluff of Old Kinsale, whose crest, overhanging, peered
from a summit of some hundred feet into the deep water that swept its rocky
base, many a tangled lichen and straggling bough trailing in the flood
beneath. Here and there upon the coast a twinkling gleam proclaimed the hut
of the fisherman, whose swift hookers had more than once shot by us and
disappeared in a moment. The wind, which began to fall at sunset, freshened
as the moon rose; and the good ship, bending to the breeze, lay gently
over, and rushed through the waters with a sound of gladness. I was alone
upon the deck. Power and the captain, whom I expected to have found, had
disappeared somehow, and I was, after all, not sorry to be left to my own
reflections uninterrupted.

My thoughts turned once more to my home,--to my first, my best, earliest
friend, whose hearth I had rendered lonely and desolate, and my heart
sank within me as I remembered it. How deeply I reproached myself for the
selfish impetuosity with which I had ever followed any rising fancy, any
new and sudden desire, and never thought of him whose every hope was in,
whos