“No, Mademoiselle.”

“Oh, but yes, I’m sure you will smoke,” and she took her cigarette from her pretty lips and gave it to me to smoke, which I did without hesitation.  That sudden conversion has been a durable one.  But I have often regretted that I could not begin it all over again!

Twenty-four hours later, at two o’clock in the morning, I was wakened in my cabin by a violent shock.  The Hercule had just run aground in the dangerous waters of the Bahama Channel.  Whatever the weather may be, the running aground of a huge body like a hundred gun ship is a serious matter.  To crown our disgrace, the corvette La Favorite, which sailed in company with us and had followed us blindly, ran aground at the same instant.  Luckily it was almost calm, and the great Hercule lay quietly on the sand like a stranded whale.  Whenever the least suspicion of a swell came, she gave a shudder, a sort of wag of her tail, which was very alarming.  If the swell increased she would soon go to pieces, and every boat we had to launch would never be enough to save the crew.  It was one of those anxious moments in a sailor’s life when each man makes it his business to conceal his own feelings.  We set hard to work to get down a big anchor on the deep-water side.  Once it was down and the cable taut, we began to lighten the ship, pouring all the water overboard, and getting ready to put the guns over the side.  Then daylight came, and showed us our real position.  A long way off we could see a low island on the coast of Florida, called Looe-Key.  The dawn also showed us, in the offing, the British corvette Pearl, commanded by our pleasant comrade of some days before, Lord Clarence Paget, who had sailed from Havana at the same time as we ourselves.  As soon as he perceived our position he hurried to our assistance, and steering with all the decision and seafaring good sense of the British sailor, he got as close as possible to us, put down his two anchors at once, and came to us, saying, “I bring you the only thing I can, a fixed point to work on.”

We thanked him cordially, but, just at that moment, thanks to our having lightened the ship, and also to the tide, which fortunately began to rise, the Hercule swayed for a few minutes on her sandy bed, and then began to float.  A sigh of relief broke from every breast, especially from those of the captain and the unlucky officer of the watch, whose carelessness had been the original cause of the accident.

A few hours more, and everything but a trifling leak had been put to rights, and we were on our way to the United States—­to a new country, a young nation, which attracted me as by instinctive sympathy.  On our very arrival in the Chesapeake river, I came across a characteristic trait.  “Can you speak French?” I asked the pilot who hailed us.  Instantly he answered me, in English, “No, I only speak American!” The claim to separate nationality extended even to the language.