e on board a merchant vessel, 'The Saint Louis,' which
is expected in Marseilles every day, if she has not already come in. And
I--I am going to Marseilles, I must see M. Champcey before anybody else
can see him."

When his sister had given him notes to the amount of four hundred
dollars, he rushed out, exclaiming,--

"To-morrow I will send you a telegram!"

XXII.

If there is in our civilized states a profession more arduous than
others it is surely that of the sailor. So arduous is it, that we are
almost disposed to ask how men can be found bold enough to embrace _it_,
and firm enough in their resolution not to abandon it after having tried
it. Not because of the hazards, the fatigues, and the dangers connected
with it, but because it creates an existence apart, and because the
conditions it imposes seem to be incompatible with free will.

Still no one is more attached to his home than the sailor. There are few
among them who are not married. And by a kind of special grace they
are apt to enjoy their short happiness as if it were for eternity,
indifferent as to what the morning may bring.

But behold! one fine morning, all of a sudden, a big letter comes from
the department.

It is an order to sail.

He must go, abandoning every thing and everybody,--mother, family, and
friends, the wife he has married the day before, the young mother who
sits smiling by the cradle of her first-born, the betrothed who was
looking joyfully at her bridal veil. He must go, and stifle all those
ominous voices which rise from the depth of his heart, and say to him,
"Will you ever return? and, if you return, will you find them all, your
dear ones? and, if you find them, will they not have changed? will they
have preserved your memory as faithfully as you have preserved theirs?"

To be happy, and to be compelled to open to mishap this fatal door,
absence! Hence it is only in comic operas, and inferior novels, that the
sailors are seen to sing their most cheerful songs at the moment when a
vessel is about to sail on a long and perilous voyage. The moment is, in
reality, always a sad one, very grave and solemn.

Such could not fail to be the scene also, when "The Conquest"
sailed,--the ship on board of which Daniel Champcey had been ordered as
lieutenant. And certainly there had been good reasons for ordering him
to make haste and get down to the port where she lay; for the very next
day after his arrival, she hoisted anchor.