silver and silk, cushioned with rich stuffs of every beautiful dye, and perfumed ad nauseam with orange-leaf tea.  The crew was a single old negress, whose head was wound about with a blue Madras handkerchief, and who stood at the prow, and by a singular rotary motion, rowed the barge with a teaspoon.  He could not get his head out of the hot sun; and the barge went continually round and round with a heavy, throbbing motion, in the regular beat of which certain spirits of the air—­one of whom appeared to be a beautiful girl and another a small, red-haired man,—­confronted each other with the continual call and response: 

“Keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight, keep the bedclothes on him and the room shut tight,”—­“An’ don’ give ‘im some watta, an’ don’ give ’im some watta.”

During what lapse of time—­whether moments or days—­this lasted, Joseph could not then know; but at last these things faded away, and there came to him a positive knowledge that he was on a sick-bed, where unless something could be done for him he should be dead in an hour.  Then a spoon touched his lips, and a taste of brandy and water went all through him; and when he fell into sweet slumber and awoke, and found the teaspoon ready at his lips again, he had to lift a little the two hands lying before him on the coverlet to know that they were his—­they were so wasted and yellow.  He turned his eyes, and through the white gauze of the mosquito-bar saw, for an instant, a strange and beautiful young face; but the lids fell over his eyes, and when he raised them again the blue-turbaned black nurse was tucking the covering about his feet.

“Sister!”

No answer.

“Where is my mother?”

The negress shook her head.

He was too weak to speak again, but asked with his eyes so persistently, and so pleadingly, that by and by she gave him an audible answer.  He tried hard to understand it, but could not, it being in these words: 

“Li pa’ oule vini ’ci—­li pas capabe.”

Thrice a day, for three days more, came a little man with a large head surrounded by short, red curls and with small freckles in a fine skin, and sat down by the bed with a word of good cheer and the air of a commander.  At length they had something like an extended conversation.

“So you concluded not to die, eh?  Yes, I’m the doctor—­Doctor Keene.  A young lady?  What young lady?  No, sir, there has been no young lady here.  You’re mistaken.  Vagary of your fever.  There has been no one here but this black girl and me.  No, my dear fellow, your father and mother can’t see you yet; you don’t want them to catch the fever, do you?  Good-bye.  Do as your nurse tells you, and next week you may raise your head and shoulders a little; but if you don’t mind her you’ll have a backset, and the devil himself wouldn’t engage to cure you.”

The patient had been sitting up a little at a time for several days, when at length the doctor came to pay a final call, “as a matter of form;” but, after a few pleasantries, he drew his chair up gravely, and, in a tender tone—­need we say it?  He had come to tell Joseph that his father, mother, sisters, all, were gone on a second—­a longer—­voyage, to shores where there could be no disappointments and no fevers, forever.