On the saloon deck, aft, the interest excited by these distant lights was less volubly eager, but it had sufficed to break up the card-games in the smoking-room, and even to tempt some malingering passengers from the cabins below. Such talk as passed among the group lounging along the rail, here in the politer quarter, bore, for the most part, upon the record of the _Moldavian_ on this and past voyages, as contrasted with the achievements of other steamships. No one confessed to reverential sensations in looking at the lights, and no one lamented the change of name which sixteen years before, had befallen the Cove of Cork; but there was the liveliest speculation upon the probabilities of the _Bahama_, which had sailed from New York the same day, having beaten them into the south harbor of Cape Clear, where, in those exciting war times, before the cable was laid, every ocean steamer halted long enough to hurl overboard its rubber-encased budget of American news, to be scuffled for in the swell by the rival oarsmen of the cape, and borne by the successful boat to the island, where relays of telegraph clerks then waited day and night to serve Europe with tidings of the republic’s fight for life. This concentration of thought upon steamer runs and records, to the exclusion of interest in mere Europe, has descended like a mantle upon the first-cabin passengers of our own later generation. But the voyagers in the _Moldavian_ had a peculiar warrant for their concern. They had left America on Saturday, April 15, bearing with them the terrible news of Lincoln’s assassination in Ford’s Theatre, the previous evening, and it meant life-long distinction--in one’s own eyes at least--to be the first to deliver these tidings to an astounded Old World. Eight days’ musing on this chance of greatness had brought them to a point where they were prepared to learn with equanimity that the rival _Bahama_ had struck a rock outside, somewhere. One of their number, a little Jew diamond merchant, now made himself quite popular by relating his personal recollections of the calamity which befel her sister ship, the _Anglia_, eighteen months ago, when she ran upon Blackrock in Galway harbor. One of these first-cabin passengers, standing for a time irresolutely upon the outskirts of this gossiping group, turned abruptly when the under-sized Hebrew addressed a part of his narrative to him, and walked off alone into the shadows of the stern. He went to the very end, and leaned over the taff-rail, looking down upon the boiling, phosphorescent foam of the vessel’s wake. He did not care a button about being able to tell Europe of the murder of Lincoln and Seward--for when they left the secretary was supposed, also, to have been mortally wounded. His anxieties were of a wholly different sort.