Out they went into the Ratcliffe Highway, and chaffered with some of the greatest rascals in trade.  The difference between what they asked and what they took made George stare.  Their little cabin was crowded with goods, only just room left for the aristocrat, the farmer and Carlo.  And now the hour came.  Poor George was roused from his lethargy by the noise and bustle; and oh, the creaking of cables sickened his heart.  Then the steamer came up and took them in tow, and these our countrymen and women were pulled away from their native land too little and too full to hold us all.  It was a sad sight, saddest to those whose own flesh and blood was on the shore and saw the steamer pull them away; bitterest to those who had no friend to watch them go.

How they clung to England! they stretched out their hands to her, and when they could hold to her no other way they waved their hats and their handkerchiefs to their countrymen, who waved to them from shore—­and so they spun out a little longer the slender chain that visibly bound them to her.  And at this moment even the iron-hearted and the reckless were soft and sad.  Our hearts’ roots lie in the soil we have grown on.

No wonder then George Fielding leaned over the ship-side benumbed with sorrow, and counted each foot of water as it glided by, and thought “Now I am so much farther from Susan.”

For a wonder he was not sea-sick, but his appetite was gone from a nobler cause; he could hardly be persuaded to eat at all for many days.

The steamer cast off at Gravesend, and the captain made sail and beat down the Channel.  Off the Scilly Isles a northeasterly breeze, and the Phoenix crowded all her canvas; when topsails, royals, skyscrapers and all were drawing the men rigged out booms alow and aloft, and by means of them set studding sails out several yards clear of the hull on either side; so on she plowed, her canvas spread out like an enormous fan or a huge albatross all wings.  A goodly, gallant show; but under all this vast and swelling plumage an exile’s heart.

Of all that smarted, ached and throbbed beneath that swelling plumage few suffered more than poor George.  It was his first great sorrow; and all so new and strange.

The ship touched at Madeira, and then flew southward with the favoring gale.  Many leagues she sailed, and still George hung over the bulwarks and sadly watched the waves.  This simple-minded, honest fellow was not a girl.  If they had offered to put the ship about and take him back he would not have consented, but yet to go on almost broke his heart.  He was steel and butter.  His friend, the honorable Frank Winchester, was or seemed all steel.  He was one of those sanguine spirits that don’t admit into their minds the notion of ultimate failure.  He was supported, too, by a natural and indomitable gayety.  Whatever most men grumble or whine at he took as practical jokes played by Fortune partly to try his good humor, but more to amuse him.