on." Her owner and commander was a tall,
lean, sinewy young man, whoso Sunday-go-to-meeting name was Zion
Awake Cox, but who was usually referred to by an ingenious
combination of the initials of these three names, and thus became
Zac, and occasionally Zachariah. This was the schooner which, on a
fine May morning, might have been seen "bounding over the billows" on
her way to the North Pole.

About her motion on the present occasion, it must be confessed there
was not much bounding, nor much billow. Nor, again, would it have
been easy for any one to see her, even if he had been brought close
to her; for the simple reason that the "Parson," as she went on her
way, carrying Zac and his fortunes, had become involved in a fog
bank, in the midst of which she now lay, with little or no wind to
help her out of it.

Zac was not alone on board, nor had the present voyage been
undertaken on his own account, or of his own motion. There were two
passengers, one of whom had engaged the schooner for his own
purposes. This one was a young fellow who called himself Claude
Motier, of Randolph. His name, as well as his face, had a foreign
character; yet he spoke English with the accent of an Englishman, and
had been brought up in Massachusetts, near Boston, where he and Zac
had seen very much of one another, on sea and on shore. The other
passenger was a Roman Catholic priest, whose look and accent
proclaimed him to be a Frenchman. He seemed about fifty years of age,
and his bronzed faced, grizzled hair, and deeply-wrinkled brow, all
showed the man of action rather than the recluse. Between these two
passengers there was the widest possible difference. The one was
almost a boy, the other a world-worn old man; the one full of life
and vivacity, the other sombre and abstracted; yet between the two
there was, however, a mysterious resemblance, which possibly may have
been something more than that air of France, which they both had.

Whatever it may have been, they had been strangers to one another
until the past few days, for Claude Motier had not seen the priest
until after he had chartered the schooner for a voyage to Louisbourg.
The priest had then come, asking for a passage to that port. He gave
his name as the Abbe Michel, and addressed Claude in such bad English
that the young man answered in French of the best sort, whereat the
good priest seemed much delighted, and the two afterwards conversed
with each other altogether in that