I
saw--all this I felt. I looked upwards, and I was at once enraptured
and humbled. Perhaps then, for the first time since I had left my
schoolboy's haunts, I bethought me that there was a God. Too, too often
I had heard his awful presence wantonly invoked, his sacred name taken
in vain. Lately, I had not shuddered at this habitual profanation. The
work of demoralisation had commenced. I knew it then, and with this
knowledge, the first pang of guilty shame entered my bosom. I stood up
with reverence upon the cross-trees. I took off my hat, and though I
did not even whisper the prayers we had used at school, mentally I went
through the whole of them. When I said to myself, "I have done those
things that I ought not to have done, and have _left undone_ those
things that I _ought_ to have done," I was startled at the measure of
sin that I had confessed. I think that I was contrite. I resolved to
amend. I gradually flung off the hardness that my late life of
recklessness had been encrusting upon my heart. I softened towards all
who had ever shown me kindness; and, in my mind, I faithfully retraced
the last time that I had ever walked to church with her whom I had been
fond to deem my mother. These silent devotions, and these
home-harmonised thoughts, first chastened, and then made me very, very
happy. At last, I felt the spirit of blissful serenity so strong upon
me, that, forgetting for a moment to what ridicule I might subject
myself; I began to sing aloud that morning hymn that I had never
omitted, for so many years, until I had joined the service--

"Awake, my soul, and with the sun."

And I confess that I sang the whole of the first verse.

I am sure that no one will sneer at all this. The good will not--the
wicked dare not. The worst of us, even if his sin have put on the
armour of infidelity, must remember the time when he believed in a God
of love, and loved to believe it. For the sake of that period of
happiness, he will not, cannot condemn the expression of feelings, and
the manifestation of a bliss that he has himself voluntarily, and, if he
would ask his own heart, and record the answer, miserably, cast away.

However, it will be long before I again trouble the reader with anything
so _outre_ as that which I have just written. Many were the days of
error, and the nights of sin, that passed before I again even looked
into my own heart. The feelings with which I made my mast-head orisons