"No, sir," replied the sailor, "I did not hear any thing about the crew or the passengers; I only know that the captain's name was Brown, and that the vessel was bound for London. There was a gentleman on board, but I did not hear his name, who wanted to come with us because we sailed so much faster; but our captain could not take him as we had our complement of passengers, and there was one gentleman among our passengers who was very ill, and wanted all the accommodation that could be afforded. He could not be very well accommodated, poor man, but every body did what they could for him. He was such a favorite with all on board, though he was a lawyer." In spite of the anxiety of the moment, the gentleman smiled at the language in which the sailor was pleased to compliment his sick passenger. He entered, therefore, into farther conversation with the men on the beach respecting the vessels expected, and concerning the probability of danger to those near land. The answers were satisfactory. The sailors were right in their predictions; the wind abated, the danger was over. The party on the shore dispersed to their respective abodes; and Clara, who was gifted with a very active imagination, could not banish from her mind the conceit that the sick man could be no other than Horatio Markham. She thought it very probable that the climate might not agree with him, and that he might have returned to his native land in hopes, in faint hopes of recovering his health; and she thought that these hopes might not be fulfilled, and then she let her imagination follow him to the grave. There she raised an imaginary monument to his memory, and she fancied that she could see the marble inscribed with some tender, touching, not common-place epitaph. Then she let her imagination dwell with a sickly sweet complacency on the thought of her frequent visits to his tomb; and because it had happened to her to have the misfortune to suffer herself, in the simplicity of her soul, to be imposed on by Miss Henderson, and because she had been roughly though kindly roused from that dream, and because she had parted from the first young gentleman who had taken her fancy, she thought that life must be to her a dreary blank, that friendship and love were pleasures only to be known by poetic description. Poor child! little did she think that all this deep feeling and all this gloom was the produce almost entirely of that unwholesome, artificial sentimentality which Miss Henderson had infected her with in her sloppy, mawkish, ricketty correspondence. By the mere force of imagination, Clara so weakened her spirits as to throw herself into a kind of low nervous fever; and had it not been for the united influence of her mother's healthful mind, and the honest skill of an intelligent physician, her life might have been sacrificed to the power of imagination.