r forty years, and
the habits of a life into which the thought of God and the dread
hereafter never entered, had encased his spiritual being in a sort of
brazen armor, through which no ordinary blow of conscience could
penetrate. Still he had fearful glimpses of recent events, and his
soul, hanging as it was over the abyss of eternity, was troubled.

"What has become of your aunt?" half whispered Spike--"my old
captain's widow. She ought to be here; and Don Wan Montezuma--where is
he?"

Rose turned aside to conceal her tears--but no one answered the
questions of the dying man. Then a gleaming of childhood shot into the
recollection of Spike, and, clasping his hands, he tried to pray. But,
like others who have lived without any communication with their
Creator through long lives of apathy to his existence and laws,
thinking only of the present time, and daily, hourly sacrificing
principles and duty to the narrow interests of the moment, he now
found how hard it is to renew communications with a being who has been
so long neglected. The fault lay in himself, however, for a gracious
ear was open, even over the death-bed of Stephen Spike, could that
rude spirit only bring itself to ask for mercy in earnestness and
truth. As his companions saw his struggles, they left him for a few
minutes to his own thoughts.

"Molly," Spike at length uttered, in a faint tone, the voice of one
conscious of being very near his end, "I hope you will forgive me,
Molly. I know you must have had a hard, hard time of it."

"It is hard for a woman to unsex herself, Stephen; to throw off her
very natur', as it might be, and to turn man."

"It has changed you sadly--even your speech is altered. Once your
voice was soft and womanish--more like that of Rose Budd's than it is
now."

"I speak as them speak among whom I've been forced to live. The
forecastle and steward's pantry, Stephen Spike, are poor schools to
send women to l'arn language in."

"Try and forget it all, poor Molly! Say to me, so that I can hear you,
'I forget and forgive, Stephen.' I am afraid God will not pardon my
sins, which begin to seem dreadful to me, if my own wife refuse to
forget and forgive, on my dying bed."

Jack was much mollified by this appeal. Her interest in her offending
husband had never been entirely extinguished. She had remembered him,
and often with woman's kindness, in all her wanderings and sufferings,
as the preceding parts of our narrative must sho