'Let us drink,' said the captain, perceiving that the better way to alter his young friend's mood was to steal him away on other paths, not to dip into deep reasoning with him.

'Ay, ay, mon ami,' cried O'Hara with a return of the reckless spirit we remarked in his character when he lay seemingly without a sou in his pocket on his bed of bitterness, 'that is the disappointed man's friend. We will drink, drink, not to woman who drove Adam out of Paradise and your humble servant out of Ireland, but to man, to the real practical man, the man who tramples humbug and pretence under foot, and believes in himself alone, the solid, hard-hitting, clear-seeing man. Captain, here's to his health!'

'To his memory, rather,' said the captain, rising and touching the outstretched glass of his host with his own, 'for his soul is lost to us these five-and-forty years. Here's to Napoleon!'

'Yes, to Napoleon!' and they both drained their glasses to the lees. The captain resumed his seat as stiffly as ever; O'Hara took a cordial glance at the bottle, and replenishing his glass, cried as he held it aloft between him and the light, and watched the amber beads frothing in creamy tumult on its surface, 'Beautiful to the sight and to the taste, strange that that liquid should be the one sure friend to whom we can fly for the means to forget the world and its sorrows, our only certain refuge——'

'My young friend,' said the old man gravely, 'it seems to me you forget God!'

The tone in which these words were spoken was gentle rather than monitory. They fell on our friend's troubled soul like the rain which refreshes, not as advice too often does, and too often is meant to fall, like blistering drops of hot wax.

The youth, who had been contemplating the sparkling liquor as an artist might a great artist creation of beauty, looked at it a moment longer, then slowly lowering it, he said, in the calm voice of conviction, to his aged guest:

'You are right; God is the refuge; we should not forget Him,' and the spirit of the grape blazed vividly up as it was spilt on the burning logs. 'I was wrong, we were both wrong, even in drinking to the memory of Napoleon.'

'Not in that, mon enfant; all great men such as he was, men who sink themselves into the time and mark it as theirs even as the maker does his name into the sword-blade—all such men are messengers from God.'

'And his nephew?'