and a grim smile. "If you'll take the trouble to examine my
back, you'll find on it the marks of the lashes I got for just telling
my Captain that it was ag'in the grain for me, a republican as I was by
idee and natur', to fight other republicans. He told, me he would first
try the grain of my skin, and see how that would agree with what he
called my duty; and I must own, he got the best on't; I fit like a tiger
ag'in you, rather than be flogged twice the same day. Flogging on a sore
back is an awful argument!"

"And now has come the hour of revenge, _pauvre Etooell; _ this time you
are on the right side, and may fight with heart and mind those you so
much hate."

A long and gloomy silence followed, during which Raoul turned his face
aft, and stood looking at the movements of the men as they washed the
decks, while Ithuel seated himself on a knight-head, and his chin
resting on his hand, he sat ruminating, in bitterness of spirit, like
Milton's devil, in some of his dire cogitations, on the atrocious wrong
of which he had really been the subject. Bodies of men are proverbially
heartless. They commit injustice without reflection, and vindicate their
abuses without remorse. And yet it may be doubtful if either a nation or
an individual ever tolerated or was an accessory in a wrong, that the
act, sooner or later, did not recoil on the offending party, through
that mysterious principle of right which is implanted in the nature of
things, bringing forth its own results as the seed produces its grain,
and the tree its fruits; a supervision of holiness that it is usual to
term (and rightly enough, when we remember who created principles) the
providence of God. Let that people dread the future, who, in their
collective capacity, systematically encourage injustice of any sort;
since their own eventual demoralization will follow as a necessary
consequence, even though they escape punishment in a more direct form.

We shall not stop to relate the moody musings of the New Hampshire man.
Unnurtured, and, in many respects, unprincipled as he was, he had his
clear conceptions of the injustice of which he had been one among
thousands of other victims; and, at that moment, he would have held life
itself as a cheap sacrifice, could he have had his fill of revenge. Time
and again, while a captive on board the English ship in which he had
been immured for years, had he meditated the desperate expedient of
blowing up the vessel; and had