a woman has; his tender memories are forever jostled by
cent. per cent.; he meets too many faces to keep the one in constant and
unchanging perpetuity sacredly before his thought. And so it happened
that Mr. Raleigh became at last a silent, keen-eyed man, with the shadow
of old and enduring melancholy on his life, but with no certain
sorrow there.

In the course of time his business-connections extended themselves; he
was associated with other men more intent than he upon their aim;
although not wealthy, years might make him so; his name commanded
respect. Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was
seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to
maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted
scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any
manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to
visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to
the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness
to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a
semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of
phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,--the merchants wrapped in
snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,--the
strange faces, modes, and manners,--the stranger beasts, immense, and
alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed
like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the
creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught
of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he
had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and
passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and
blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature. One
day all was ready for his departure; and in the clipper ship Osprey,
with a cargo for Day, Knight, and Company, Mr. Raleigh bade farewell
to India.

The Osprey was a swift sailer and handled with consummate skill, so that
I shall not venture to say in how few days she had weathered the Cape,
and, ploughing up the Atlantic, had passed the Windward Islands, and off
the latter had encountered one of the severest gales in Captain
Tarbell's remembrance, although he was not new to shipwreck. If Mr.
Raleigh had found no time for reflection in the busy current of