In the early hours of the night the loading of the cargo was still unfinished. The calls of the deck-hands, the vociferations of the mate, which were of an intensity, a fervor, a mad strenuousness, that might seem never heard before out of Bedlam, the clash and commotion of boxes and barrels, the lowing of cattle and bleating of sheep, for the lower deck was given over to the transportation of army supplies, sounded erratically, now louder, now moderated, dying away and again rising in agitated vibrations. Sometimes, as he lay, a great flare of light illumined the tiny apartment as the torches, carried by the roustabouts on shore, cast eerie vistas into the darkness, and he could see the closely fitted white planking of the ceiling just above his head, the white coverlet, and through the glass door, that served too as window, the railing of the guards without and the dim glimpse of the first street of the town--River Avenue--about on a level with his eye, so deep was the declivity to the wharf. Quiet came gradually. The grating and shifting of the cargo ceased first; the boat was fully loaded at length. Then the voices became subdued,--once a snatch of song, and again a burst of laughing banter between the roustabouts going up into the town and the deck-hands about to turn in on the boat. Now it was so quiet that he could distinguish the flow of the current. Yet he could not sleep. Once he seemed near unconsciousness when he heard the clash of iron as the stoker was banking the fires, for steam was up. Then Julius lay in unbroken silence, till an owl hooted from out the Roscoe woods down the river. There was home! He thought of his father with so filial a tenderness that the mere recollection might be accounted a prayer. In that dense mass of foliage off toward the west, under the stars and the moon, stood the silent house, invisible at the distance, but every slant of the roof, every contour of the chimneys, every window and door,--nay, every moulding of the cornice, was as present to his contemplation as if he beheld it in floods of matutinal sunshine. "Oh, bless it!" he breathed. "Bless it, and all it holds!" With dreary melancholy he fell to gazing out at the real instead,--at the vague slant to the wharf in the flickering moonlight, and the dim warning glow of a lantern on an obstructive pile of brick on the crest of River Avenue. Somehow the trivial thing had a spell to hold his eyes, as he watched it with a mournful, dull apprehension of what might betide, for he feared to hope still to escape--so often had this hope allured and disappointed him. Would something happen at the last moment--and what would the next disaster be?