with people who wish to be sent home again.  She has hidden away her papers somewhere; not that I was going to steal them:  but it shows how little trust she puts in any thing, or any one, except the keeping of her own secret.  However, she does adhere obstinately, and hopefully for us, to her original hint, ‘you are not what he thinks you;’ although she will not condescend to any single proof, or explanation, against the mighty mass of evidence, which probabilities, and common rumour, and the general’s own belief, have heaped together.  When I call you Emmy, too—­the old soul, in her broad Scotch way, always corrects me, and invokes a blessing upon ‘A-amy:’  so there is a mystery somewhere:  at least, I fervently hope there is:  and, if the old woman has been playing us false, let us resign ourselves to God, my girl; for our fate will be that matters are as people say they are—­and then my old black postscript ends too truly with a wo, wo, wo—!

“But I must shake off all this lethargy of gloom, dearest, dearest girl—­how can I dare to call you so?  Let me, therefore, rush for comfort into other thoughts; and tell you at once of the fearful dangers we have now mercifully escaped; for the Samarang lies like a log in this friendly port, dismasted, and next to a wreck.

“I proceed to show you about it; perhaps I shall be tedious—­but I do it as a little rest, my own soul’s love, from anxious, earnest, heart-distracting prayers continually, continually, that the sorrow which I spoke of be not true.  Sometimes, a light breaks in, and I rejoice in the most sanguine hope:  at others, gloom—­

“But a truce to all this, I say.  Here shall follow didactically the cause why the good ship Samarang is not by this time in the Docks.

“We were lying somewhere about the tropical belt, Capricorn you know, (O, those tender lessons in geography, my Emmy!) quite becalmed; the sea like glass, and the sky like brass, and the air in a most stagnant heat:  our good ship motionless, dead in a dead blue sea it was

‘Idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’

“The sails were hanging loosely in the shrouds:  every one set, from sky-scraper to stud-sail, in hopes to catch a breath of wind.  My fellow-passengers and the crew, almost melted, were lying about, as weak as parboiled eels:  it was high-noon, all things silent and subdued by that intolerable blaze; for the vertical sun, over our multiplied awnings and umbrellas, burnt us up, fierce as a furnace.

“I was leaning over the gangway, looking wistfully at the cool, clear, deep sea, wherefrom the sailors were trying to persuade a shark to come on board us, when, all at once, in the south-east quarter, I noticed a little round black cloud, thrown up from the horizon like a cricket-ball.  As any thing is attractive in such sameness as perpetual sea and sky, my discovery was soon made known, and among the first to our captain.

“Calling for his Dolland, and bidding his second lieutenant run quick to the cabin and look at the barometer, he viewed the little cloud in evident anxiety, and shook his head with a solemn air:  more than one light-hearted woman thinking he was quizzing them.