These are the lethargic moments of a seaman’s life.  Days of toil bring nights of drowsiness; and the repose of nature presents a constant temptation to imitate her example.  The reaction of excitement destroys the disposition to indulge in the song, the jest, or the tale; and the mind, like the body, is disposed to rest from its labors.  Even the murmuring wash of the water, as it rises and falls against the vessel’s sides, sounds like a lullaby, and sleep seems to be the one great blessing of existence.  Under such circumstances, therefore, it is not surprising that the watch on the deck of the lugger indulged this necessary want.  It is permitted to the common men to doze at such moments, while a few are on the alert; but even duty, in the absence of necessity, feels its task to be irksome, and difficult of performance.  Lookout after lookout lowered his head; the young man who was seated on the arm-chest aft began to lose his consciousness of present things, in dreamy recollections of Provence, his home, and the girl of his youthful admiration.  The seaman at the helm alone kept his eyes open, and all his faculties on the alert.  This is a station in which vigilance is ever required; and it sometimes happens in vessels where the rigid discipline of a regular service does not exist, that others rely so much on the circumstance that they forget their own duties, in depending on the due discharge of his by the man at the wheel.

Such, to a certain degree, was now the fact on board le Feu-Follet.  One of the best seamen in the lugger was at the helm, and each individual felt satisfied that no shift of wind could occur, no change of sails become necessary, that Antoine would not be there to admonish them of the circumstance.  One day was so much like another, too, in that tranquil season of the year, and in that luxurious sea, that all on board knew the regular mutations that the hours produced.  The southerly air in the morning, the zephyr in the afternoon, and the land wind at night, were as much matters of course as the rising and setting of the sun.  No one felt apprehension, while all submitted to the influence of a want of rest and of the drowsiness of the climate.

Not so with Antoine.  His hairs were gray.  Sleep was no longer so necessary to him.  He had much pride of calling, too; was long experienced, and possessed senses sharpened and rendered critical by practice and many dangers.  Time and again did he turn his eyes toward Campanella, to ascertain if any signs of the enemy were in sight; the obscurity prevented anything from being visible but the dark outline of the high and rock-bound coast.  Then he glanced his eyes over the deck, and felt how completely everything depended on his own vigilance and faithfulness.  The look at the sails and to windward brought no cause for uneasiness, however; and, presuming on his isolation, he began to sing, in suppressed tones, an air of the Troubadours; one that he had learned in childhood, in his native langue du midi.  Thus passed the minutes until Antoine saw the first glimmerings of morning peeping out of the darkness, that came above the mountain-tops that lay in the vicinity of Eboli.  Antoine felt solitary; he was not sorry to greet these symptoms of a return to the animation and communion of a new day.