--"The _Thetis_!" echoed Mathieu; "then we shall soon see Monsieur Gabriel. What delight for Josèphe! Quick; let's tell her." He was hurrying off, but Dorot kept him back. "No hurry," said he; "never reckon too surely on what a ship brings home. Pick people out, and they're just those that are missing when the roll's called. Better wait till the Lieutenant brings his own news." --"You're right," replied the quarter-master; "the more so since the frigate comes, if I don't mistake, from the Havannah." --"Who knows whether she won't bring you some lodgers for your lazaretto?" --"So be it; they'll be welcome. With Geneviève and the children, one can't be dull; but once in a while there's no harm in a little company. You fellows at the Ile des Morts, you have the artillery despatch-carrier, who keeps you up to all that goes on, to say nothing of inspections and your convoys of powder; whilst here--never a thing! Not one visitor in a twelvemonth! At least, if you have to put people sometimes into quarantine, you hear what's done on land there, and that leaves you some thing to talk about for months." The artillery-man shrugged his shoulders--"That's all very well, when they don't bring disease with them; but the old coasters still talk of a quarantine in which the lazaretto ran short of both earth and rock for burying the dead, and when the bodies were of necessity thrown into the sea with a shot attached to their necks, as in vessels out on a voyage." --"Now may Christ spare us such a trial!" exclaimed Ropars, respectfully touching his hat, as he was used to do whenever he pronounced the Saviour's name. "But you're speaking of a long time ago, Dorot; please Heaven, we won't see such again. There are no heathen here now; and I believe that God's good will will take care of us." Dorot nodded his acquiescence. In fact this confidence, springing from a simple faith, had up to that time been justified by experience. During the thirteen years that the keeper had spent at Trébéron, he had only received healthy persons into quarantine, who were complying with a formal regulation, and were obliged to make proof of their good health by undergoing this preventive sequestration. There were indeed rare exceptions. Like all lazarettos, that of Trébéron remained generally unoccupied; and the keeper kept watch there alone, like an ever-living sentinel posted in advance of the continent, for the purpose of warding off contagion.