"Yes, horrible enough!" answered the stoker. "But what I was speaking of, is the foolish habit that passengers have--I have seen it often in crossing the Atlantic--of coming down into the fire-room very soon after they start, and taking a look at the furnaces. A good many of them never sleep a wink afterwards, during the whole voyage, I believe, thinking of that mass of red-hot coal lying in the middle of the ship, and wondering _when_ she is going to burn. They are fools to come down at all: if they would just keep out of the way they would never know how badly it looks, and then at least they would never be burned until their time came!" Just then the raging monster within seemed to demand more blazing food, and the stoker turned away to attend to his duty. Had he remained conversing one moment longer, he might have seen Carlton Brand totter back against the bulk-head of the fire-room, literally gasping for breath--then grapple for the railing of the stairs, and ascend the steps with the staggering motion of a sick or drunken man, breathing heavily and giving painful indications of being on the verge of falling insensible. When the lawyer again emerged to the air of the deck, his face was ghastly white, and he seemed altogether strangely altered since the moment of his descent into those regions of fire and grime and terrible suggestion. What had so changed him?--the heat, choking his lungs and preying upon a frame unaccustomed to it?--or had the curse of his nature again found him out, in the low of the furnaces and the heedless conversation of the fireman? and did he remember that between himself and even that flight beyond the sea which only could shut out from his ears the voice of contempt and the cry of a neglected country, there yet lay the peril of the Amazon and the Austria? This occurred on Friday the third of July; and between that day and the Sunday following there was nothing in the movements of the sojourner at the Fifth Avenue, worthy of special record. But on that Sunday afternoon, perhaps at the very hour when Kitty Hood, in one spot of that section of country which had been his old home, was glorying over her lover's having been at Gettysburgh,--and when Robert Brand, in another, was writhing and cursing over the absence of his son from the same great battle,--an incident took place at the hotel, apparently trivial, but which may subsequently be found to have exercised no slight influence on the fortunes of some of the different persons named in this chronicle. Unfortunately, again, over this little event hangs a mist and a shadow, and only slight glimpses can be obtained of what afterwards proved to be of such unsuspected importance.