“Ah! you are a boatman, you say?” Daniel exclaimed, quite pleased at the encounter.  “Well, where is your boat?”

“There, Mr. Officer, a little way down; just follow me.  But what ship do you want to go to?”

“That ship there.”

And Daniel pointed out to him “The Conquest” as she lay not six hundred yards off in the river, showing her lights.

“That is rather far,” grumbled the man; “the tide is low; and the current is very strong.”

“I’ll give you a couple of francs for your trouble.”

The man clapped his hands with delight, and said,—­

“Ah! if that’s the way, all right.  Come along, Mr. Officer, a little farther down.  There, that’s my boat.  Get in, now steady!”

Daniel followed his directions; but he was so much struck by the man’s awkwardness in getting the boat off, that he could not help saying to him,—­

“Ah, my boy, you are not a boatman, after all!”

“I beg pardon, sir; I used to be one before I came to this country.”

“What is your country?”

“Shanghai.”

“Nevertheless, you will have to learn a great deal before you will ever be a sailor.”

Still, as the boat was very small, a mere nutshell, in fact, Daniel thought he could, if needs be, take an oar himself.  Thereupon, sitting down, and stretching out his legs, he was soon once more plunged in meditations.  The unfortunate man was soon roused, however, by a terrible sensation.

Thanks to a shock, a wrong movement, or any other accident, the boat upset, and Daniel was thrown into the river; and, to fill the measure of his mishaps, one of his feet was so closely jammed in between the seat and the boat itself, that he was paralyzed in his movements, and soon under water.

He saw it all in an instant; and his first thought was,—­

“I am lost!”

But, desperate as his position was, he was not the man to give up.  Gathering, by one supreme effort, all his strength and energy, he took hold of the boat, that had turned over just above him, and pushed it so forcibly, that he loosened his foot, and at the same moment reached the surface.  It was high time; for Daniel had swallowed much water.

“Now,” he thought, “I have a chance to escape!”

A very frail chance, alas!—­so small a chance, in fact, that it required all the strong will and the invincible courage of Daniel to give it any effect.  A furious current carried him down like a straw; the little boat, which might have supported him, had disappeared; and he knew nothing about this formidable Dong-Nai, except that it went on widening to its mouth.  There was nothing to guide him; for the night was so dark, that land and water, the river and its banks, all melted together in the uniform, bottomless darkness.

What had become of the boatman, however?  At all events, he called,—­

“Ahoy, my man!”