On returning to Philadelphia from the desert, as I have already said, having hurriedly written on the road "what I have just related," like the old man in La Fontaine, I did not find the remittances I expected: this was the commencement of the pecuniary difficulties in which I have been plunged ever since. Fortune and I conceived a mutual dislike at first sight. According to Herodotus, certain Indian ants used to heap together piles of gold; according to Athenæus, the sun gave Hercules a golden ship in which to accost the island of Erythia, the home of the Hesperides: ant though I be, I have not the honour to belong to the great Indian family; and navigator though I be, I have never crossed the sea, save in a wooden bark. It was a vessel of this kind which brought me back to Europe from America. The captain gave me my passage on credit. On the 10th of December 1791, I embarked with several of my fellow-countrymen who were returning to France, like myself, for various reasons. The ship's destination was the Havre. [Sidenote: I return to Europe.] A westerly gale caught us at the mouth of the Delaware and drove us right across the Atlantic in seventeen days. Often, scudding under bare poles, we were scarcely able to bring to. The sun did not appear a single time. The vessel, steering by a dead reckoning, flew before the waves. I crossed the ocean among shadows; never had it looked to me so sad. I myself, sadder still, was returning deceived, after my first step taken in life: "Palaces are not built upon the sea," says the Persian poet Feryd-Eddyn[544]. I felt a vague heaviness of heart, as at the approach of a great misfortune. Turning my eyes over the waves, I asked them to tell me my destiny, or else I used to write, more inconvenienced by their motion than troubled by their threats. So far from calming, the tempest increased the nearer we came to Europe; but it blew steadily: the uniformity of its raging produced a sort of furious lull in the wan sky and leaden sea. The captain, having no means of taking the altitude, was uneasy; he climbed into the shrouds and scanned each point of the horizon through a telescope. A look-out was placed on the bowsprit, another in the main-top-mast cross-trees. The sea became choppy, and the colour of the water changed, signs that we were approaching land: what land? The Breton sailors have a proverb, "Who sees Belle-Isle sees his isle; who sees Groie sees his joy; who sees Ouessant's shore sees his gore."