into the boisterous deep, could have been of no use to him.  Indignation, despair, overwhelmed him.  None appeared to understand the nature of his feelings; all pretending to wonder that a European born, should not be grateful to any occasion that would carry him away from a savage country like that.  In vain Laonce remonstrated; in vain he talked of his wife and children; the captain and his sailors laughed, promised him better of both sorts among his kindred whites; and when he cursed their hardened hearts and cruel treachery, they laughed again, and left him to his misery.  At last, when the protracted hurricane subsided, and the vessel’s log-book proved that she had been driven several degrees leeward of the Society Isles, abandoned to a sullen despair, he ceased to accuse or to reproach; he ceased even to speak on any subject, but cast himself into his lonely berth during the day, that he might not be irritated to continued unavailing madness, by the sight of the ingrates who had betrayed him.  To his straining eyes, nothing but the silvery line of the starlit sea was on that distant horizon; but his heart’s vision pierced farther, and he beheld the sleepers in that home;—­no, not the sleepers!  His disconsolate, his despairing wife, tearing her bright locks, and beating the tender bosom he must no longer clasp to his own.  His children—­“Oh! my babes!” cried he, and the cry of a father’s heart for once pierced the obdurate bosom of the captain, who, in that moment, had happened to come upon the deck to examine the night.  To ease his Otaheitan benefactor, he declared he had thus carried him off, to share in the honour of his expected discoveries.  The unhappy chief, in then answering him, begged, that if he had, indeed, any spark of honesty towards him, he would prove it, by obeying his wish in one thing at least; and that was, to set him on shore on the first European settlement they should fall in with.  “Do this,” said he, “and I may yet believe you have honour.  For honour is a man’s own act; a discovery is fortune’s; and for its advantages, did I stay, I should not have to thank you.  But I want none such.  Set me on shore, and there I will follow my own destiny.”

To this poor request, the iron-souled commander of the vessel, at last consented; and in the course of some weeks after, Laonce was landed on the coast of Kamschatka.  His secret intent was to lie in wait for the possibility of some ship touching at the port where he was set ashore, that might be bound to the track of his beloved islands; but not uttering a word of this, to the reprobate wretch who had torn him thence, he simply bade him “farewell! and to use his next pilot better;” so saying, they parted for ever.  But weeks and months passed away, and no vessel bound for the South Seas, showed itself in that distant latitude; and its gloomy fogs, and chilling atmosphere, its pale sky, where the sun never shone for more than three or four hours in the day, seemed to wither up his life with his waning hopes!