r eyes; while the
recollection of the width of the chasm that separated them, had the effect
to embitter these proofs of love. Most females would have lost the sense
of duty which sustained our heroine in this severe trial, and, in
accepting the man of their heart, would have trusted to time, and her own
influence, and the mercy of Divine Providence, to bring about the change
she desired; but Mary Pratt could not thus blind herself to her own high
obligations. The tie of husband and wife she rightly regarded as the most
serious of all the obligations we can assume, and she could not--_would_
not plight her vows to any man whose 'God was not her God.'

Still there was much of sweet consolation in this little-expected letter
from Roswell. He wrote, as he always did, simply and naturally, and
attempted no concealments. This was just as true of his acts, as the
master of the schooner, as it was in his character of a suitor. To Mary he
told the whole story of his weakness, acknowledging that a silly spirit of
pride which would not permit him to seem to abandon a trial of the
qualities of the two schooners, had induced him to stand on to the
westward longer than he should otherwise have done, and the currents had
come to assist in increasing the danger. As for Daggett, he supposed him
to have been similarly influenced; though he did not withhold his
expressions of gratitude for the generous manner in which that seaman had
stuck to him to the last.

For weary months did Mary Pratt derive sweet consolation from her treasure
of a letter. It was, perhaps, no more than human nature, or woman's nature
at least, that, in time, she got most to regard those passages which best
answered to the longings of her own heart; and that she came at last to
read the missive, forgetful in a degree, that it was written by one who
had deliberately, and as a matter of faith, adopted the idea that the
Redeemer was not, in what may be called the catholic sense of the term,
the Son of God. The papers gave an account of the arrival of the 'Twin Sea
Lions,' as the article styled them, in the port of Beaufort, to repair
damages; and of their having soon sailed again, in company. This paragraph
she cut out of the journal in which it met her eye, and enclosing it in
Roswell's last letter, there was not a day in the succeeding year in which
both were not in her hand, and read for the hundredth time, or more. These
proofs of tenderness, however, are not to b