teen all told, includin' a woman and a little
girl. Lend a hand to get the poor things up to our house, Harry," said
the captain, lifting the apparently inanimate form of a young girl over
the side as he spoke; "she ain't dead--only benumbed a little with the
cold."

Many hands were stretched out, but Harry thrust all others aside, and,
receiving the light form of the child in his strong arms, bore her off
to his father's cottage, leaving his comrades to attend to the wants of
the others.

"Oh Harry!" exclaimed Mrs Boyns, when her son burst into the house, "is
your father safe?"

"Ay, safe and well," he cried. "Look sharp, mother--get hot blankets
and things ready, for here's a little girl almost dead with cold. She
has just been rescued from a wreck--saved by the new lifeboat!"

CHAPTER TWO.

DESCRIBES A MERCHANT AND HIS GOD, AND CONCLUDES WITH "A MESSAGE FROM THE
SEA."

A close-fisted, hard-hearted, narrow-minded, poor-spirited man was John
Webster, Esquire, merchant and shipowner, of Ingot Lane, Liverpool. And
yet he was not altogether without good points. Indeed, it might be said
of him that if he had been reared under more favourable circumstances he
might have been an ornament to society and a blessing to his country,
for he was intelligent and sociable, and susceptible to some extent of
tender influences, when the indulging of amiable feelings did not
interfere with his private interests. In youth he had even gone the
length of holding some good principles, and was known to have done one
or two noble things--but all this had passed away, for as he grew older
the hopeful springs were dried up, one by one, by an all-absorbing
passion--the love of money--which ultimately made him what he was, a
disgrace to the class to which he belonged, and literally (though not,
it would seem, in the eye of law) a wholesale murderer!

At first he began by holding, and frequently stating, the opinion that
the possession of much money was a most desirable thing; which
undoubtedly was--and is, and will be as long as the world lasts--
perfectly true, if the possession be accompanied with God's blessing.
But Mr Webster did not even pretend to look at the thing in that light.
He scorned to make use of the worldly man's "Oh, of course, of course,"
when that idea was sometimes suggested to him by Christian friends. On
the contrary, he boldly and coldly asserted his belief that "God, if
there was a God at all, did not i