'And that's a rare fine box you have it in; not the box, I mean, but the casket which holds it,' answered O'Hara, taking the gold case in his hands.
'What's this? The bees which the Bonapartes brought from Corsica, the eagle with the thunder-bolt in his talons, and the Imperial cipher. I'm not a judge of goldsmith's work, but I should say that's a piece of some value.'
'And the horn box—the box for which all this finery is the covering. What d'ye think of that?'
'It is not valuable in material nor artistically, and yet it may be valuable as a souvenir,' said O'Hara, after regarding it.
'Ah! I would not give that box for ten—what?—a thousand times its weight in gems,' said the old man, kissing it reverently. 'There's a story attached to it.'
'Yes, yes, how we do cling to the relic of what has passed from us, and each day, as we look upon it, it becomes more precious in our sight!' said O'Hara, half in soliloquy, drawing a little parcel from his breast. 'Here it is now, only a lock of woman's hair, faded, flattened out of curl, and she—where is she?—what does she? Does she ever think of me? Bah!'—with a violent jerk thrusting back the parcel to its resting-place; 'you're a fool, O'Hara! Come, captain, let me fill you a bumper of the grape-juice.'
The captain had been watching the by-play with the tress of woman's hair with an amiable, almost sympathizing, eye. 'Young friend,' said he, 'you've loved and been disappointed, I take it; but do not despair.' O'Hara blushed. 'At your time of life,' continued the captain, 'one does not die of those crosses. I know them. Do not blush; I, too, have been disappointed in what my heart had set its affections upon, and, alas! it has coloured my whole existence.'
'A good blood-colour, I fancy,' said O'Hara with a sardonic humour.
'Ah! you are disposed to take a cynical view of the sex. That is too soon. Life for you should be a comedy, as yet violet-crowned; a toying with honey goblets and rose-leaves; it is too soon to bring in the daggers and the cups of gall and the cypress-wreaths.'
'Life violet-crowned for me!' said O'Hara mockingly. 'It is a vile, malodorous sham; there is nothing true, nothing sincere in it but sin and death. The world is a mercenary, peddling world—the one only trade which is not meanness and fraud is the soldier's trade, where man is paid for cutting the throat of his fellow-man.'