abin door: he might find
himself in the sea in another minute. The men who had thrown the
master overboard would not have much scruple about sending an
inferior officer after him. If the mate resolved to show fight, it
would be necessary for him to kill every man on board, even the cook,
before he could feel safe; and then he would be left alone in
mid-ocean with nobody to help him to navigate the vessel--a master
and crew under one hat, at the mercy of the winds and the waves, with
six murdered men on his conscience; and he had a conscience, too, as
was soon to be proved.

The seamen swore most solemnly that they did not intend to do him the
least harm, and at last the mate opened his door. While in his
cabin, he had been spending what he believed to be the last minutes
of his life in preparing for death; he did his best to make peace
with heaven, and tried to pray. But his mouth was dry with fear, his
tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, his memory of sacred things
failed him, and he could not pray for want of practice. He could
remember only one short prayer, and he was unable to utter even that
audibly. And how could a prayer ever reach heaven in time to be of
any use to him, when he could not make it heard outside the
deck-house? In his desperate straits he took a piece of chalk and
began to write it; so when at last he opened the door of his cabin,
the four seamen observed that he had nearly covered the boards with
writing. It looked like a litany, but it was a litany of only three
words--"Lord, have mercy"--which were repeated in lines one above
the other.

That litany was never erased or touched by any man who subsequently
sailed on board the 'Industry'. She was the first vessel that was
piloted up the channel to Port Albert in Gippsland, to take in a
cargo of fat cattle, and when she arrived there on August 3rd, 1842,
the litany of the mate was still distinctly legible.

Nothing exalts a man so quickly in the estimation of his fellow
creatures as killing them. Emperors and kings court the alliance of
the conquering hero returning from fields of slaughter. Ladies in
Melbourne forgot for a time the demands of fashion in their struggles
to obtain an ecstatic glimpse of our modern Bluebeard, Deeming; and
no one was prouder than the belle of the ball when she danced down
the middle with the man who shot Sandy M'Gee.

And the reverence of the mate for his murdering crew was
unfathomable. Their lig