n obtain; refraining
from reading and writing until accustomed to one's situation, and paying
great attention to the use of aperients; I believe all is said that an old
traveller, and an old sailor too, can communicate on a subject so
important to those who are unaccustomed to the sea. Can your experience
suggest anything more?

We lay that night at the quarantine ground; but early on the morning of
the 2nd, all hands were called to heave-up. The wind came in puffs over
the heights of Staten, and there was every prospect of our being able to
get to sea in two or three hours. We hove short, and sheeted home, and
hoisted the three topsails; but the anchor hung, and the people were
ordered to get their breakfasts, leaving the ship to tug at her
ground-tackle with a view to loosen her hold of the bottom.

Everything was now in motion. The little Don Quixote, the Havre ship just
mentioned, was laying through the narrows, with a fresh breeze from the
south-west. The Liverpool ship was out of sight, and six or seven sails
were turning down with the ebb, under every stitch of canvass that would
draw. One fine vessel tacked directly on our quarter. As she passed quite
near our stern, some one cried from her deck:--"A good run to you,
Mr. ----." After thanking this well-wisher, I inquired his name. He gave me
that of an Englishman, who resided in Cuba, whither he was bound. "How
long do you mean to be absent?" "Five years." "You will never come back."
With this raven-like prediction we parted; the wind sweeping his vessel
beyond the reach of the voice.

These words, "You will never come back!" were literally the last that I
heard on quitting my country. They were uttered in a prophetic tone, and
under circumstances that were of a nature to produce an impression. I
thought of them often, when standing on the western verge of Europe, and
following the course of the sun toward the land in which I was born; I
remembered them from the peaks of the Alps, when the subtle mind,
outstripping the senses, would make its mysterious flight westward across
seas and oceans, to recur to the past, and to conjecture the future; and
when the allotted five years were up, and found us still wanderers, I
really began to think, what probably every man thinks, in some moment of
weakness, that this call from the passing ship was meant to prepare me for
the future. The result proved in my case, however, as it has probably
proved in those of most men, th