'No one can be more wise than destiny.'

'What are we waiting for? why, two more passengers--grand ladies as
they tell me--and the captain has gone ashore to fetch them,' the
first mate of the 'Granville' barque, of London, made answer to
Frederick Conyngham, and he breathed on his fingers as he spoke, for
the north-west wind was blowing across the plains of the Medoc, and
the sun had just set behind the smoke of Bordeaux.

The 'Granville' was lying at anchor in the middle of the Garonne
river, having safely discharged her deck cargo of empty claret casks
and landed a certain number of passengers. There are few colder
spots on the Continent than the sunny town of Bordeaux when the west
wind blows from Atlantic wastes in winter time. A fine powder of
snow scudded across the flat land, which presented a bleak brown
face, patched here and there with white. There were two more
passengers on board the 'Granville,' crouching in the cabin--two
French gentlemen who had taken passage from London to Algeciras in
Spain, on their way to Algiers.

Conyngham, with characteristic good-nature, had made himself so
entirely at home on board the Mediterranean trader that his presence
was equally welcomed in the forecastle and the captain's cabin.
Even the first mate, his present interlocutor, a grim man given to
muttered abuse of his calling and a pious pessimism in respect to
human nature, gradually thawed under the influence of so cheerful an
acceptance of heavy weather and a clumsy deck cargo.