and full of pain,—­warm, wide, Southern nights, when all the stars, great and golden, leaned out of heaven to meet him, and all ripe perfumes, wafted by their own principle of motion, floated in the rich dusk and laden air about him, and the phantom of snow on topmost heights sought vainly to lend him its calm.  Days also must have showered their fervid sunshine on him, as he journeyed through plains of rice, where all the broad reaches whitening to harvest filled him with intense and bitterest loneliness.  What region of spice did not recall the noons when they two had trampled the sweet-fern on wide, high New England pastures, and breathed its intoxicating fragrance? and what forest of the tropics, what palms, what blooms, what gorgeous affluence of color and of growth, equalled the wood on the lake-shores, with its stately hemlocks, its joyous birches, its pale-blue, shadow-blanched violets?  Nor was this regret, that had at last become a part of the man’s identity, entirely a selfish one.  He had no authority whatever for his belief, yet believe he did, that, firmly and tenderly as he loved, he was loved, and of the two fates his was not the harder.  But a man, a man, too, in the stir of the world, has not the time for brooding over the untoward events of his destiny that 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.