ess chapels,
preachers were heard calling down a malediction on the machine, and
declaring that this number 17 was no other than the total of the ten
horns and seven heads of the beast of the Apocalypse. In America, they
invoked against the steamboats the beast from the book of Revelation; in
Europe, the reptile of the book of Genesis. This was the simple
difference.

The savants had rejected steamboats as impossible; the priests had
anathematised them as impious. Science had condemned, and religion
consigned them to perdition. Fulton was a new incarnation of Lucifer.
The simple people on the coasts and in the villages were confirmed in
their prejudice by the uneasiness which they felt at the outlandish
sight. The religious view of steamboats may be summed up as follows:
Water and fire were divorced at the creation. This divorce was enjoined
by God himself. Man has no right to join what his Maker has put asunder;
to reunite what he has disunited. The peasants' view was simply, "I
don't like the look of this thing."

No one but Mess Lethierry, perhaps, could have been found at that early
period daring enough to dream of such an enterprise as the establishment
of a steam-vessel between Guernsey and St. Malo. He, alone, as an
independent thinker, was capable of conceiving such an idea, or, as a
hardy mariner, of carrying it out. The French part of his nature,
probably, conceived the idea; the English part supplied the energy to
put it in execution.

How and when this was, we are about to inform the reader.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Genesis, chap. iii. v. 16.

[3] Genesis, chap. i. v. 4.

III

RANTAINE

About forty years before the period of the commencement of our
narrative, there stood in the suburbs of Paris, near the city wall,
between the Fosse-aux-Loups and the Tombe-Issoire, a house of doubtful
reputation. It was a lonely, ruinous building, evidently a place for
dark deeds on an occasion. Here lived, with his wife and child, a
species of town bandit; a man who had been clerk to an attorney
practising at the Chatelet--he figured somewhat later at the Assize
Court; the name of this family was Rantaine. On a mahogany chest of
drawers in the old house were two china cups, ornamented with flowers,
on one of which appeared, in gilt letters, the words, "A souvenir of
friendship;" on the other, "A token of esteem." The child lived in an
atmosphere of vice in this miserable home. The father and mother having
belo