in this voyage, not brief at best, and of which every day's progress must assure him anew toward what land and what people he was hastening. Moreover, Fate had woven his lot, it seemed, inextricably among those whom he would shun; for Mr. Laudersdale himself was deeply interested in the Osprey's freight, and it would be incumbent upon him to extend his civilities to Mr. Raleigh. But Mr. Raleigh was not one to be cozened by circumstances more than by men.

The severity of the gale, which they had met some three days since, had entirely abated; the ship was laid to while the slight damage sustained was undergoing repair, and rocked heavily under the gray sky on the long, sullen swell and roll of the grayer waters. Mr. Raleigh had just come upon deck at dawn, where he found every one in unaccountable commotion. "Ship to leeward in distress," was all the answer his inquiries could obtain, while the man on the topmast was making his observations. Mr. Raleigh could see nothing, but every now and then the boom of a gun came faintly over the distance. The report having been made, it was judged expedient to lower a boat and render her such assistance as was possible. Mr. Raleigh never could tell how it came to pass that he found himself one of the volunteers in this dangerous service.

The disabled vessel proved to be a schooner from the West Indies in a sinking condition. A few moments sufficed to relieve a portion of her passengers, sad wretches who for two days had stared death in the face, and they pulled back toward the Osprey. A second and third journey across the waste, and the remaining men prepared to lower the last woman into the boat, when a stout, but extremely pale individual, who could no longer contain his frenzy of fear, clambered down the chains and dropped in her place. There was no time to be lost, and nothing to do but submit; the woman was withdrawn to wait her turn with the captain and crew, and the laden boat again labored back to the ship. Each

trip in the heavy sea and the blinding rain occupied no less than a couple of hours, and it was past noon when, uncertain just before if she might yet be there, they again came within sight of the little schooner, slowly and less slowly settling to her doom. As they approached her at last, Mr. Raleigh could plainly detect the young woman standing at a little distance from the anxious group, leaning against the broken mast with crossed arms, and looking out over the weary stretch with pale, grave face and quiet eyes. At the motion of the captain, she stepped forward, bound the ropes about herself, and was swung over the side to await the motion of the boat, as it slid within reach on the top of the long wave, or receded down its shining, slipery hollow. At length one swell brought it nearer, Mr. Raleigh's arms snatched the slight form and drew her half-fainting into the boat, a cloak was tossed after, and one by one the remainder followed; they were all safe, and some beggared. The bows of the schooner already plunged deep down in the gaping gulfs, they pulled bravely away, and were tossed along from billow to billow.

"You are very uncomfortable, Mademoiselle Le Blanc ?" asked the rescued captain at once of the young woman, as she sat beside him in the stern-sheets.

"Moi?" she replied. "Mais non, Monsieur."

Mr. Raleigh wrapped the cloak about her, as she spoke. They were equidistant from the two vessels, neither of which was to be seen, the rain fell fast into the hissing brine, their fate still uncertain. There was something strangely captivating and reassuring in this young girl's equanimity, and he did not cease speculating thereon till they had again reached the Osprey, and she had disappeared below.

By degrees the weather lightened; the Osprey was on the wing again, and a week's continuance of this fair wind would bring them into port. The next day, toward sunset, as Mr. Raleigh turned about in his regular pacing of the deck, he

saw at the opposite extremity of the ship the same slight figure dangerously perched upon the taffrail, leaning over, now watching the closing water, and now eagerly shading her eyes with her hand to observe the ship which they spoke, as they lay head to the wind, and for a better view of which she had climbed to this position. It was not Mr. Raleigh's custom to interfere; if people chose to drown themselves, he was not the man to gainsay them; but now, as his walk drew him toward her, it was the most natural thing in the world to pause and say,—

"Il serait fâcheux, Mademoiselle, lorsqu' on a failli faire naufrage, de se noyer" —and, in want of a word, Mr. Raleigh ignominiously descended to his vernacular-" -"with a lee-lurch."

The girl, resting on the palm of one hand, and unsupported otherwise, bestowed upon him no reply, and did not turn her head. Mr. Raleigh looked at her a moment, and then continued his walk. Returning, the thing happened as he had predicted, and, with a little quick cry, Mademoiselle Le Blanc was hanging by her hands among the ropes. Reaching her with a spring, "Viens, petite!" he said, and with an effort placed her on her feet again before an alarm could have been given.

"Ah! mais je crus c'en était fait de moi!" she exclaimed, drawing in her breath like a sob. In an instant, however, surveying Mr. Raleigh, the slight emotion seemed to yield to one of irritation, that she had been rescued by him; for she murmured quickly, in English, head haughtily thrown back and eyes downcast," Monsieur thinks that I owe him much for having saved my life!"

"Mademoiselle best knows its worth," said he, rather amused, and turning away.

The girl was still looking down; now, however, she threw after him a quick glance.

"Tenez!" said she, imperiously, and stepping toward him. "You fancy me very ungrateful," she continued, lifting her slender hand, and with the back of it brushing away the floating hair at her

temples. "Well, I am not, and at some time it may be that I prove it. I do not like to owe debts; but, since I must, I will not try to cancel them with thanks."

Mr. Raleigh bowed, but said nothing. She seemed to think it necessary to efface any unpleasant impression, and, with a little more animation and a smile, added,—

"The Captain Tarbell told me your name, Mr. Raleigh, and that you had not been at home for thirteen years. Ni moi non plus,—at least, I suppose it is home where I am going; yet I remember no other than the island and my”.

And here the girl opened her eyes wide, as if determined that they should not fill with tears, and looked out over the blue and sparkling fields around them. There was a piquancy in her accent that made the hearer wish to hear further, and a certain artlessness in her manner not met with recently by him. He moved forward, keeping her beside him.

"Then you are not French," he said.

"I? Oh, no,-nor Creole. I was born in America; but I have always lived with mamma on the plantation; et maintenant, il y a six mois qu'elle est morte!”

Here she looked away again. Mr. Raleigh's glance followed hers, and, returning, she met it bent kindly and with a certain grave interest upon her. She appeared to feel reassured, somewhat protected by one so much her elder.

"I am going now to my father," she said, "and to my other mother."

anhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to our experience, you know."

"What is it like, Sir? But I know! Rows of houses, very counterparts of rows of houses, and they of rows of houses yet beyond. Just the toy-villages in boxes, uniform as graves and ugly as bricks"

"Brick houses are not such ugly things. I remember one, low and wide, possessed of countless gables, covered with vines and shaded with sycamores; it could not have been so picturesque, if built of the marble of Paros, and gleaming templewhite through masks of verdure."

No; the houses there are palaces."

แ I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace," she answered, with a light tinkling laugh. "That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness. How one must feel the roof!"

"Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?" said Mr. Raleigh.

"At home," she replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. Ainsi soit il!" she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

"You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be obliged to wear the shroud."

66

Not long, to be sure, at first. We go to freeze in the country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,— old Ursule. Oh, Sir, she was drowned! I saw the very wave that swept her off!"

"That was your servant ? ❤ "Yes."

"Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you. She was tall and large?" "Oui."

"Her name was Ursule?"

"Oui! je dis que oui!"

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness. "She is below, then," he said, "not

drowned. There is Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?"

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman's escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening into friendliness. It was an agreeable variation from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not unpleasant to her. Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck together. Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon. She puzzled him, too, and he found singular contradictions in her: to-night, sweetness itself,- to-morrow, petulant as a spoiled child. She had all a child's curiosity, too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh in her garden. Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic abandon, scenes of her gay and innocent island-life, so that he fancied there was not an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, allunaware, he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient régimes, in whose lives there were strange lacunæ and spaces of shadow. And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of

finding him in the same mood in which she had left him, as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged. Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence. At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate, at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one, spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he leaned over the ship's side.

"Voici ma capote !" said she, before he was aware of her approach. "Ciel! qu'il fait frais!"

"We have changed our skies," said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

"It is not necessary that you should tell me that!" she replied. "I shiver all the time. I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of floating down to melt off Martinique!"

"Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the purpose."

"Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, une jouissance vraie, Monsieur, to think that men can paint,— that these shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be rivalled by us and made permanent,-that man is more potent than light."

"But you are all wrong in your sance."

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.

Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had been writing, and restored it to his pocket. She turned about and broke off her song.

"There is the moon on the other side," she said, "floating up like a great bubble of light. She and the sun are the scales of a balance, I think; as one ascends, the other sinks."

"There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset melts into moonrise, that makes one fancy it enveloping the earth like the bloom on a plum."

"And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters look like the wings of the papillon bleu.”

"It seems that you love the sea."

"Oh, certainly. I have thought that we islanders were like those Chinese who live in great tanka-boats on the rivers; only our boat rides at anchor. To climb up on the highest land, and see yourself girt with fields of azure enamelled in sheets of sunshine and fleets of sails, and lifted against the horizon, deep, crystalline, and translucent as a gem,that makes one feel strong in isolation, and produces keen races. Don't you think so?"

She pouted her lip, and hung over the

"I come from India, where, if anywhere, there is race."

"But, pshaw! that was not what we were talking about.”

No, Mademoiselle, we were speaking of an element even more fluctuating than American population."

"Of course I love the sea; but if the sea loves me, it is the way a cat loves the mouse."

"It is always putting up a hand to snatch you?" "I suppose I am sent to Nineveh and persist in shipping for Tarshish. I never enter a boat without an accident. The Belle Voyageuse met shipwreck, and I on board. That was anticipated, though, by all the world; for the night before we set sail, it was a very murk, hot night, -we were all called out to see the likeness of a large merchantman transfigured in flames upon the sky,-spars and ropes and hull one net and glare of fire." "A mirage, probably, from some burning ship at sea."

"No, I would rather think it supernatural. Oh, it was frightful! Rather superb, though, to think of such a spectral craft rising to warn us with ghostly flames that the old Belle Voyageuse was riddled with rats!"

"Did it burn blue?" asked Mr. Raleigh.

"Oh, if you're going to make fun of me, I'll tell you nothing more!"

As she spoke, Capua, who had considered himself, during the many years of wandering, both guiding and folding star to his master, came up, with his eyes rolling fearfully in a lively expansion of countenance, and muttered a few words in Mr. Raleigh's ear, lifting both hands in comical consternation the while.

"Excuse me a moment," said Mr. Raleigh, following him, and, meeting Captain Tarbell at the companion-way, the three descended together.

Mr. Raleigh was absent some fifteen minutes, at the end of that time rejoining Mademoiselle Le Blanc.

"I did not mean to make fun of you," said he, resuming the conversation as if

there had been no interruption. "I was watching the foam the Osprey makes in her speed, which certainly burns blue. See the flashing sparks! now that all the red fades from the west, they glow in the moon like broken amethysts."

"What did you mean, then ?" she asked, pettishly.

"Oh, I wished to see if the idea of a burning ship was so terrifying."

"Terrifying? No; I have no fear; I never was afraid. But it must, in reality, be dreadful. I cannot think of anything else so appalling."

"How do you know all this of yourself?" he asked, with an amused air. "Il se présentait des occasions," she replied, briefly.

"So I presumed," said he. "Ah? They have thrown out the log. See, we make progress. If this breeze holds!"

"You are impatient, Mr. Raleigh. You have dear friends at home, whom you wish to see, who wish to see you?"

"No," he replied, with a certain bitterness in his tone. "There is no one to whom I hasten, no one who waits to receive me."

"No one? But that is terrible! Then why should you wish to hasten? For me, I would always be willing to loiter along, to postpone home indefinitely." "That is very generous, Mademoiselle." "Mr. Raleigh". "Well?"

"I wish - please - you must not say Mademoiselle. Nobody will address me so, shortly. Give me my name, — call me Marguerite. Je vous en prie."