“I console myself, dear Lucy,” wrote he, “as well as I may, by thinking that in my great sacrifice I have earned the love of my father,--that love from which I have lived so long estranged, and for which my heart had never ceased to yearn; and I delight to think how by this time you must have grown into his heart, soothed many a care for him, and imparted to his solitary life the blessing of that bright hopefulness which gave even to my own dull existence a glow of glad sunshine. Out of my selfishness I cannot help asking you to remind him of all I have given him. And now that my egotism is so fully aroused, let me tell of myself. The voyage was less dreary than my fears had made it. I suffered at first, it is true; and when at last use had inured me to the sea, I fell into a sort of low feverish state, more the result of homesickness, perhaps, than real malady. It was a condition of rather depression than disease. Nothing could engage, nothing interest me. I could not read, neither could I partake in any of the various pastimes by which my fellow-voyagers beguiled the hours; and I found myself in that pitiable state of sinking daily lower and lower, without what I could call a cause for the depression. “I have more than once in my experience as a doctor had to deal with such cases, and I own now that I have neither valued their intensity nor understood their importance. I did not, it is true, go to the vulgar extent of calling them hippishness; but I did the next worse thing,--I treated them as the offspring of an over-easy existence, of a placid frictionless life. “With much shame do I recall how often I have rallied these poor sufferers on the vast space that separated them from real sorrow. There is no unreality, dearest Lucy, in whatever so overcomes the brain that thought is all but madness, and so pains the heart that the whole wish is for death. There are subtler influences in our nature than those that work by the brain or the blood, and the maladies of these have but one physician. “It was my great good-fortune to have a fellow-traveller who took the kindest interest in me. If he could not cure, he certainly did much to console me. He was a young man, lately gazetted on the commander-in-chief's staff, and who came on board of us in the Downs from a frigate bound for England. It was the merest accident that he did not miss us and lose his passage. “I am not a very attractive person, and it was with some astonishment that I heard he desired to make my acquaintance; and on meeting he said, 'Though you have forgotten me, Dr. Lendrick, I had the honor of being presented to you at Killaloe by my friend Sir Brook Fossbrooke;' and I then remembered all about it, and how it was his features were so familiar to me,--very good features, too, they were, with much candor and manliness in the expression,--altogether a handsome young fellow, and with an air of good birth about him just as distinctive as his good looks.