Even five months before, when the Bellevite had sailed on her cruise, the rumble of coming events had been heard in the United States; and it had been an open question whether or not war would grow out of the complications between the North and the South. Only a few letters, and fewer newspapers, had reached the owner of the yacht; and he and his family on board had been very indifferently informed in regard to the progress of political events at home. Captain Passford was one of those who confidently believed that no very serious difficulty would result from the entanglements into which the country had been plunged by the secession of the most of the Southern States. He would not admit even to himself that war was possible; and before his departure he had scouted the idea of a conflict with arms between the brothers of the North and the brothers of the South, as he styled them. Captain Passford had been the master of a ship in former times, though he had accumulated his vast fortune after he abandoned the sea. His father was an Englishman, who had come to the United States as a young man, had married, raised his two sons, and died in the city of New York. These two sons, Horatio and Homer, were respectively forty-five and forty years of age. Both of them were married, and each of them had only a son and a daughter. While Horatio had been remarkably successful in his pursuit of wealth in the metropolis, he had kept himself clean and honest, like so many of the wealthy men of the great city. When he retired from active business, he settled at Bonnydale on the Hudson. His brother had been less successful as a business-man, and soon after his marriage to a Northern lady he had purchased a plantation in Alabama, where both of his children had been born, and where he was a man of high standing, with wealth enough to maintain his position in luxury, though his fortune was insignificant compared with that of his brother. Between the two brothers and their families the most kindly relations had always existed; and each made occasional visits to the other, though the distance which separated them was too great to permit of very frequent exchanges personally of brotherly love and kindness. Possibly the fraternal feeling which subsisted between the two brothers had some influence upon the opinions of Horatio, for to him hostilities meant making war upon his only brother, whom he cherished as warmly as if they had not been separated by a distance of over a thousand miles. He measured the feelings of others by his own; and if all had felt as he felt, war would have been an impossibility, however critical and momentous the relations between the two sections. Though his father had been born and bred in England, Horatio was more intensely American than thousands who came out of Plymouth Rock stock; and he believed in the union of the States, unable to believe that any true citizen could tolerate the idea of a separation of any kind.