Kay sat apart from the revellers, smoking a cigar, with his arms folded across his breast, a moody and sombre expression upon his countenance, and his eyes bent upon the dirty floor. He was thinking of the past—thinking, amid the riotous din of jests and oaths, laughter and song, of all that he had been, and of what he might have been, of time misspent, and golden opportunities lost, of talents misapplied and energies misdirected. It was a mournful retrospect for the man not wholly lost, his heart was not entirely corroded, nor all indurated by vice and profligacy, the powers of his mind had not become sapped by the vicious excesses in which he had indulged; he was capable of forming a sound judgement of human actions, both his own and those of others; and to look back excited for these reasons, feelings, sombre and mournful. The past of his life was a dreary waste to look back upon; he was fully conscious of the fact, he was able to discriminate between the right and the wrong, and to perceive his errors, and he felt at that moment all the dreariness, the moral void, of the vista upon which he turned his mental vision. True, the desert was not entirely without its oases; there were green spots breaking the gloomy monotony of its arid and cheerless aspect, but these only deepened by the contrast the impression made by the general barrenness. He was roused from his reverie by the words of a song sung, or rather shouted by one his countrymen—an Englishman—a sailor belonging to a vessel then lying in the harbor. There was nothing to interest him in the words themselves, but they seemed familiar to him, like a voice heard in our youth and half forgotten, which we hear again after a long interval of time, and they struck upon his mind by the force of association. In his boyhood he had heard that song, which had been a favorite chant with a schoolfellow, and the words now called up a thousand recollections of the time when he had first heard them, just as the remembered sound of the church-bells of our native place will recall such memories when we hear them after long absence from the scenes of our early existence. To the mind of the robber, predisposed to reflection, the words of the song recalled the school-room and the play-ground, with many a reminiscence of merry companions and boyish games; and from these his heart wandered to the home of his childhood, to the little garden into which he had transplanted primroses and cowslips from the woods to the rippling brook upon which he had launched his tiny ships, to the darkly shaded seat under the old elm tree on which he had rested when weary, to the innocent and smiling faces of his fair-haired sisters.