close to her knees, grateful even to thanksgiving that he had escaped so ghastly a doom. As for Ben himself, his eyes were glazed with tears, and as he still looked up in the captain's face, the big drops kept rolling over his long lashes till his little waistcoat was dappled with the stains.

The good-natured captain did not fail to note how deeply the lad had been touched with the story, and jerking his head on one side toward the boy, so as to draw the father's attention to the youngster, he indulged in one of his habitual chuckles as he said, "Come, come, Ben, swab the decks. You haven't heard half of the perils of a sailor's life yet. Ah! you lads think a long voyage at sea is as pleasant as a half hour's cruise in the summer time; so I did once; but a few weeks in the middle of the ocean, where even the sight of a gull, or a brood of Mother Carey's chickens seems a perfect Godsend in the intense solitude of the great desert about you, and where the same everlasting ring of the horizon still pursues you day after day, till the sense of the distance you have to travel positively appals the mind a few weeks of such a life as this, lad, is sufficient to make the most stubborn heart turn back to home and friends, and to pray God in the dead of the night, when there is nothing but the same glistening cloud of stars set in the same eternal forms to keep one company, that he may be spared to clasp all those he loves to his bosom once again. You think a sailor, youngster, a thoughtless dare-devil of a fellow, with hardly a tender spot to his nature-the world speaks of his heart as a bit of oak; but I can tell you, boy, if you could hear the yarns that are spun during the dog-watches on the fo'cas'l, there is hardly a tale told that isn't homeward bound, as we say, and made up of the green scenes of life rather

than the ugly perils at sea. Ay! and what's more, Ben, if we could but know the silent thoughts of every heart on deck during the stillness of the middle watch, I'd wager there is not one among them that isn't away with mother, sister, or sweetheart, prattling all kinds of fond and loving things to them. Your father Josiah, too, would tell you that sailors are a godless, blaspheming race; but I can tell you, lad, better than he (for I know them better), that a seaman, surrounded as he always is with the very sublimity of creationwith the great world of water by day, which seems as infinite and incomprehensible as space itself, and with the lustrous multitude of stars by night-the stars, that to a sailor are like heaven's own beacon-lights set up on the vast eternal shore of the universe, as if for the sole purpose of guiding his ship along a path where the faintest track of any previous traveler is impossible-the sailor, I say, amid such scenes as these, dwells under the very temple of the Godhead himself, and shows in the unconquerable superstition of his naturedespite his idle and unmeaning oaths-how deeply he feels that every minute of his perilous life is vouchsafed him, as it were, through the mercy of the All-merciful."

The pious brothers bent their heads in reverence at the thoughts, while the mother looked tenderly and touchingly toward her son-in-law, and smiled as if to tell him how pleased she was to find that even he, sailor as he was, had not forgotten the godly teaching of his Puritan parents.

For a moment or two there was a marked silence among the family. The captain had touched the most solemn chord of all in their heart, and they sat for a while rapt in the sacred reverie that filled their mind like the deep-toned vibration of "a passing bell."

saw it next the eye was fixed and glazed, the features as if cut in stone, the hand heavy and cold as lead; and I felt that, boy as I was, I had looked for the first time deep down into the great unfathomable sea of our common being. The hardest thing of all, lad, is to believe in death; and when we have been face to face with a man day by day, there seems to be such a huge gap left in the world when he is gone, that the mind grows utterly skeptical, and can hardly be convinced that an existence, which has been to it the most real and even palpable thing in all the world, can have wholly passed away. To look into the same eyes, and find them return no glance for glance; to speak, and find the ear deaf, the lips sealed, and the voice hushed, is so incomprehensible a change that the judgment positively reels again under the blow. Ashore, lad, you can get away from death-you can shut it out with other scenes-but on board ship it haunts you like a spectre; and then the day after comes the most dreadful scene of all-burial on the high seas."

The captain remained silent for a moment or two, so that Ben might be able to "chew the cud" of his thoughts. Holmes had noticed the little fellow's head drop at the mention of the death at sea, and he was anxious that the lad should realize to himself all the horror of such a catastrophe.

Presently Captain Holmes began again: "As the bell tolls, the poor fellow's shipmates come streaming up the hatchways, with their heads bare and their necks bent down; for few can bear to look upon the lifeless body of their former companion, stretched, as it is, on the hatches beside the ship's gangway, pointing to its last homethe sea; while the ship's colors, with which it is covered, scarcely serve to conceal the outline of the mummy-like form stitched in the hammock

underneath. It needs no elocution, Ben, to mak the service for the dead at sea the most solem and impressive of all prayers-an outpouring tha causes the heart to grieve and the soul to shud der again in the very depth of its emotion; for with the great ocean itself for a cathedral, and the wild winds of heaven to chant the funeral dirge, there is an awe created that can not possibly be summoned up by any human handiwork. when the touching words are uttered of 'ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,' and the body is slid from under the colors into the very midst of the ocean