road
river. Placing the helm amid-ships, the man went forward, and, pulling
the proper line, brought the masts to their upright position. He then
inserted the iron keys which kept them in their place, and hoisted the
sails. By this time the boat had drifted to the lower extremity of the
island; so, bracing her sharp up, he stood away across the river.
Tacking before he reached the swift channel, which flowed close in
shore, he laid the boat's course up the stream. The wind was blowing
fresh, and, notwithstanding the contending force of the current, the
boat careened to her task, and made very good progress through the
water. While the gallant little bark pursues her way, we will introduce
her skipper to the reader.

Dr. Vaudelier was about fifty years of age. He was descended from one of
the old French families of Louisiana; and had been, for nearly thirty
years, a practising physician in the city of New Orleans, during which
time he had accumulated a very handsome fortune. At the age of
twenty-five he had been married to a lady, whose only recommendations
were her personal beauty and her fashionable accomplishments. Her vanity
had disgusted him, and her uncontrollable temper had embittered to its
very dregs the cup of his existence. Being naturally of a gloomy and
melancholy temperament, this unfortunate union had rendered his life
almost insupportable. Domestic happiness, to which he had looked forward
with high-wrought anticipations, proved, in his case, to have no
foundation.

He was disappointed. His dream of home and its blessings faded away, and
was supplanted by a terrible reality. He grew more and more melancholy.
But there was a solace, which saved him from absolute misery. Two
children--a boy and a girl--blessed his otherwise unhallowed union. The
education of these children was the only joy his home afforded; but
even this to his misanthropic mind could not compensate for his
matrimonial disappointment.

Years passed away; the son was sent to college, from which, to the
anguish of his father, he was expelled for gross misconduct. The young
man returned to New Orleans, and became one of the most dissolute and
abandoned characters of the city. Dr. Vaudelier disowned him, and sunk
the deeper in his melancholy.

The death of his wife left him alone with his daughter; and if the fatal
influence of past years could have been removed, perhaps he might have
been a happy man. The daughter was a beautiful girl, a