lize the strongest,
and which break out suddenly, carrying a man off in a few hours.

"You ought not to become a misanthrope, my dear Champcey," they would
say. "Come, for Heaven's sake shake off that sadness, which might make
an end of you before you are aware of it!"

And jestingly they added,--

"Decidedly, you regret the banks of the Kamboja!"

They thought it a jest: it was the truth. Daniel did regret even the
worst days of his mission. At that time his grave responsibility,
overwhelming fatigues, hard work, and daily danger, had procured him at
least some hours of oblivion. Now idleness left him, without respite or
time, face to face with his distressing thoughts. It was the desire, the
necessity almost, of escaping in some manner from himself, which made
him accept an invitation to join a number of his comrades who wanted to
try the charms of a great hunting party.

On the morning of the expedition, however, he had a kind of
presentiment.

"A fine opportunity," he thought, "for the assassin hired by Sarah
Brandon!"

Then, shrugging his shoulders, he said with a bitter laugh,--

"How can I hesitate? As if a life like mine was worth the trouble of
protecting it against danger!"

When they arrived on the following day on the hunting ground, he, as
well as the other hunters, received their instructions, and had their
posts assigned them by the leader. He found himself placed between two
of his comrades, in front of a thicket, and facing a narrow ravine,
through which all the game must necessarily pass as it was driven down
by a crowd of Annamites.

They had been firing for an hour, when Daniel's neighbors saw him
suddenly let go his rifle, turn over, and fall.

They hurried up to catch him; but he fell, face forward, to the ground,
saying aloud, and very distinctly,--

"This time they have not missed me!"

At the outcry raised by the two neighbors of Daniel, other hunters had
hastened up, and among them the chief surgeon of "The Conquest," one of
those old "pill-makers," who, under a jovial scepticism, and a rough,
almost brutal outside, conceal great skill and an almost feminine
tenderness. As soon as he looked at the wounded man, whom his friends
had stretched out on his back, making a pillow of their overcoats, and
who lay there pale and inanimate, the good doctor frowned, and growled
out,--

"He won't live."

The officers were thunderstruck.

"Poor Champcey!" said one of them, "to escape th