Chicago, and "I don't know where in thunder he is from, nor his name
nuther. I forgot to ask it, he was so stiff and offish. He was in
college with Tom Hardy and visited him years ago; that's all I know,"
the planter said, and after that the stranger was left mostly to
himself, while the passengers busied themselves with gossip, and the
scenery, and trying to keep cool.

The day was hot and grew hotter as the sun rose higher in the heavens,
and the stranger felt very uncomfortable, but it was not the heat which
affected him as much as the terrible network of circumstances which he
had woven for himself. It was the harvest he was reaping as the result
of one false step, when his brain was blurred and he was somebody
besides the elegant gentleman whom people felt it an honor to know. He
was himself now, crushed inwardly, but carrying himself just as proudly
as if no mental fire were consuming him, making him think seriously more
than once of jumping into the river and ending it all. He was very
luxurious and fastidious in his tastes, and would have nothing unseemly
in his home at the North, where he had only to say to his servants come
and they came, and where, if he died on his rosewood bedstead with
silken hangings, they would make him a grand funeral--smother him with
flowers, and perhaps photograph him as he lay in state. Here, if he
ended his life, in the river, with alligators and turtles, he would be
fished up a sorry spectacle, and laid upon the deck with weeds and ferns
clinging to him, and no one knowing who he was till they sent for Tom
Hardy at that moment hurrying back to his home in Georgia, from which he
had come at the earnest request of his friend. He did not like the looks
of himself bedraggled and wet, and dead, on the deck of the "Hatty,"
with that curious crowd looking at him, Mandy Ann with the rest. Strange
that thoughts of Mandy Ann should flit through his mind as he decided
against the cold bath in the St. John's and _to face_ it, whatever it