Five years passed, and with restored health back came the old desires in redoubled force.  Fournier longed to return to civilization and to work.  The life that had been so delightful while it did him good became utterly unbearable when he had reaped its full benefit.  I am tempted to quote a line about Europe and Cathay, but refrain:  it will recur to the reader.  He burned to renew the labors he had abandoned, to take up again the work he had laid down to do battle with disease, now that disease was vanquished.  Thus the year 1863 found him in the city of Charleston, homeward bound in his journey around the world.

While still in the wilds west of the Mississippi he could have shaped his course northward and readily proceeded directly by steamer from New York to Europe.  But a determined purpose led him to choose a different course, though he was well aware that it would involve indefinite delay in reaching Paris, and great personal risk.  The life he had been leading made him think lightly of danger, and years would be well spent if he could accomplish the plans that induced him to go into the disorganized country of the South.

He straightway connected himself with the army as surgeon, and solicited a place at the front.  He wanted active service.  In this he was disappointed.  Charleston, blockaded and beseiged, was in a state of military inaction.  Save the occasional exchange of shot and shell at long range between the works on shore and those which the Unionists had erected and held upon the neighboring islands and marshes, nothing was done, and for nearly a year Fournier experienced the irksomeness of routine duty in a wretchedly arranged and appointed military hospital.  Nevertheless, the time was not wholly wasted.  From a planter fleeing from the anarchy of civil war he procured a native African slave, one of the shipload brought over a few years before in the Wanderer, the last slave-ship that put into an American harbor.  This man he made his body-servant and kept always near him, partly to study him, but chiefly to secure his complete mental and moral thraldom.  An almost unqualified savage, Fournier avoided systematiclly everything that would tend to civilize him.  He taught him many things that were convenient in his higher mode of life, and taught him well, but of the great principles of civilization he strove to keep him in ignorance; and more, he so confused and distorted the few gleams of light that had reached that darkened soul that they made its gloom only the more hideous and profound.  He wanted a man altogether savage, mentally, morally and physically.  Instead of teaching him English or French, he learned from him many words of his own rude native tongue, and communicated with him as much as possible in that alone, aided by gesture, in which, like all Frenchmen, he possessed marvelous facility of expression.  In the unexplored back-country of Africa the negro had been a prince, and Fournier bade him look forward to the time when