CHAPTER XX

THE DEATH OF ALICE LEE

The storm passed away in the night, and when the morning came there was a breathless calm upon the sea. On my way from the steerage I looked out through the saloon door for a minute or two. All sail was set upon the ship, but there was no wind. The white canvas was pouring in and out somewhat heavily, and as it beat the masts the thunderous, crackling notes it rang through the motionless atmosphere were like the noise of the wheels of artillery drawn at a gallop over a stony street. The sea was breathing heavily after its conflict of the previous day, and the ship was rolling majestically, but at the same time very uncomfortably, upon the glass-white swell.

The decks were crowded with emigrants. Children were tumbling and sporting in the channel under the bulwarks, called the ‘scuppers,’ as though their instincts directed them to find a playground in the gutters of the ship. Some of the people appeared to be breakfasting. With one hand they grasped tin mugs full of a steaming black liquid, probably called tea by those who served it out to them, and in the other hand they held a piece of flinty biscuit, and with this dry, disgusting fare a number of the poor creatures were breaking their fast.

There were some delicate faces amongst the women--two or three with eyes of beauty, and two or three with rich auburn hair. I longed to go amongst the poor people and ask them questions, and learn from what parts of the country they came. I thought to myself, one of those many men and women may have it in his or her power to give me back my memory by saying something that might serve as a burning brand for the dark galleries of my brain. But it was a desire which the rules of the ship forbade me to satisfy.

Presently I caught sight of the gipsy woman. She showed her teeth and nodded demonstratively, as if she would have her fellow-passengers take notice that she and I were friends. I coldly nodded in return, and then, learning from the stewardess that Mrs. Lee had not yet left her berth, I walked to the end of the saloon, where I could sit retired, and there waited for the breakfast-bell to ring and for the passengers to appear.

The first to come out of her berth was Mrs. Lee. She immediately saw and approached me. She looked as if she had been crying, and there was an expression of deep and settled grief in her face. I asked after Alice, but with a sinking heart, as I gazed at the poor, anxious, devoted mother.

‘She has been very ill in the night,’ she answered. ‘She is very low this morning.’

‘But yesterday she seemed so much better.’

‘Oh! she is dying, Agnes, she is leaving me. God is fast withdrawing her from me now,’ and she wept afresh.

I hung my head. I could not look into the face of her grief and find words.

And now again the poor woman reproached herself for having brought her child to sea when it was too late. She talked indeed as though she had overheard what Mr. McEwan had said to me on the previous day, or as though he had repeated his discourse to her.

‘She would have been comfortable at home,’ she exclaimed amidst her sobs. ‘Her rest is broken by the narrow bunk she lies in, and she is distressed by the movements of the ship. At home she would lie peacefully in her own bedroom, she would be surrounded by familiar objects, friends would come and sit with her, and--oh, Agnes!’ She stopped in her speech as though a spasm had wrenched her heart.

I knew what was in her mind, and the tears sprang into my eyes.

‘Her grave,’ continued Mrs. Lee in a whisper, ‘would not be far away from me. I should be able to visit it, to see that it is tended as her sister’s is: but----’ She stopped again in her speech and directed her eyes at one of the large circular windows through which, as the ship rolled, we could now and again catch a sight of the glassy volumes of water.

While she talked of her dying child the breakfast-bell rang. She rose and said: ‘I cannot sit at the table. I cannot bear to be asked questions about Alice, though they are kindly meant. Come to me when you have breakfasted,’ and she returned to her berth.

I felt, now that the mother was without hope, that there was no hope indeed. My own grief was so keen that I was as unequal to the task of sitting at the breakfast table as Mrs. Lee, and after drinking a cup of tea, which one of the stewards brought to me before the passengers assembled, I slipped downstairs to my cabin there to wait until it should be time to visit Alice. My low spirits were not only owing to the news which Mrs. Lee had given me: I had passed a miserable night disturbed by many shapeless undeterminable dreams, and broken by long passages of waking thought. The gipsy woman’s repeated deliberate assurance that I was not only a wife but a mother also influenced me as though her words were the truth itself. A secret voice within me was for ever whispering, ‘It is so! It is so!’ and I cannot express how dreadful was the anguish of my mind as I sought in the void within for any, the least, stir of shadow to which I could give some form of memory.

And I was sensible too of a heartache as of yearning, though I knew not what I yearned for. I sought to explain to myself this subtle craving by saying, ‘I am a mother and I yearn for my children;’ and yet my children were to me then as though they had never been born! What, then, did this sense of yearning signify? Was it a desire put into my head by the gipsy woman’s talk--first, the belief that I was a mother as she had said, and then a craving to _know_ whether or not I had left children behind me in my unknown home? Or was it the deep, unfailing, deathless, maternal instinct whose accents were sounding to my heart out of the darkness that was upon my mind, as the whisper of a spirit falls upon the waking ear in the blackness of the night, serving as an impulse and an inspiration, though the listener knows not whence the sound proceeds nor what it is?

It happened as Mrs. Lee had feared. As the wife of a shipowner she had met many seafaring men in her time, and she talked of the sea with something of the knowledge of an experienced ocean traveller. The calm weather which she had dreaded happened. For many days, whose number my memory does not carry, the sea stretched flat and lifeless round about the ship, and the rim of it was dim with the faint blue haze of heat whilst the central sky was a blaze of white light. Faint airs called catspaws occasionally tarnished the table-flat plain of the ocean; but so weak were these draughts that they expired long before they reached the ship, and for hours and for days the _Deal Castle_ sat upright upon the water without motion except a small swaying of her mast-heads, and there was so perfect a reflection of her fabric of black sides and star-white canvas under her that one might have believed on gazing over the side that she rested on a sheet of looking-glass.

No sail could heave into view in such stagnant weather. Never was the hot, blurred edge of the ocean broken by the thread-like shadowing of a steamer’s smoke. There was nothing to see but water, and there was nothing for the passengers to do but to lounge and eat and sleep and grumble. The heat told fearfully on Alice Lee. The saloon and berths were unendurably hot, and the doctor ordered the girl to be carried on deck on a couch. She begged not to be disturbed; her mother entreated her to allow the people to carry her on deck, and then she consented; but when they put their hands upon her she fainted, and so deep and long was her swoon that we feared she had died. The doctor then directed that she should be left as she was.

Her mother and I nursed her between us. Mrs. Richards put a little arm-chair in the dying girl’s berth, and I sat and watched whilst Mrs. Lee slept; and then, when it came to Mrs. Lee’s turn to watch, I would fall asleep in the chair, and thus we would pass the nights. Oh, it was a bitter sad time! The mother fought with her grief in the sight of her child that she might not witness the agony of her affliction; but often at night, when she lay down after several hours of watching, instead of sleeping she would weep, very silently indeed, but I could tell by the breathing that her tears were flowing.

Alice’s sufferings were not great. Time after time in the silent watches of the night--and silent indeed were the watches of those breathless nights of equatorial calm--I would rise on observing the dear girl to move uneasily, bend over her, and ask if she suffered; and regularly would she answer me in her sweet voice and with her sweet smile that she was free from pain, that she desired but a little air, but that she was not suffering, and then she would extend her thin, damp, cold hand for me to hold, and ask me if her mother was sleeping, and then whisper that she was happy, that she was dying, that she knew she was dying, but that the holy peace of God which passes all understanding was upon her heart, and that she was praying for the hour to come when He would take her to Himself.

Once she awoke uttering a cry as of rapture. I was at her side in an instant.

She looked a little strangely at me, then, as an expression of recognition entered her eyes, she exclaimed; ‘I have been with my angel sister. Can it have been a dream? How real, how real it was! We stood together hand in hand--I do not know where--the light was that of the moon. Our dear mother was coming and we waited for her. Can it have been a dream?’ Her smile faded; she sighed, closed her eyes, and was presently asleep again.

I could tell you many sweet things of this beautiful character as she lay dying in that little cabin, but it is my own, and not Alice Lee’s, story that I have undertaken to relate. Yet the mystical part that she played in the turning-point of my life is so truly wonderful that I cannot but dwell upon her blessed memory. She was the good angel of my life, and God afterwards sent her from Heaven to me, as you shall read when you come to that part of my experiences.

And though I had known her but for a few weeks, yet as she lay dying on her bed my love could not have been deeper for her than had she been flesh of my own flesh, had she been my sister or my child, had her mother been mine, and we had grown together in years with never a day of separation.

It was the night of the eleventh day of the calm, but this night the breathlessness of the atmosphere was broken by a faint air of wind. The window of Alice’s berth was wide open, but though I put my hand into it I felt no movement of air. Yet a small weak wind was blowing; it was past midnight, and in the stillness of this hour I heard the noise of waters faintly rippling, and the deep silence was unbroken by the notes of flapping canvas, for there was wind enough to ‘put the sails to sleep,’ as a pretty saying of the sea goes.

Mrs. Lee had been lying down since ten o’clock, and was sleeping, but I should awaken her presently, for it had been arranged that she should watch from after midnight until three or four in the morning. I was faint, and there was a feeling of nausea upon me. The atmosphere of the cabin was oppressively close. In spite of the awning having been spread throughout the day the heat of the sun was in the planks of the deck, and this heat, though it was now the hour of midnight, was still in the planks, and it struck through into the atmosphere of the cabin as though a great oven rested on the ceiling of the little interior.

There are many sorts of illness which are sad and afflicting to nurse, but none so sad and afflicting, I think, as consumption in its last stage. There was a weight upon my spirits; I panted for the deck, and for the starlit freedom of the cool night. Alice had been resting motionlessly for nearly an hour. I knew not whether she slept or was awake, and would not look lest I should disturb her if she was sleeping. Her eyes were closed, her thin hands were crossed saint-like upon her breast, her face was as white as though the moon shone upon it. Through the open window, that was somewhat above her sleeping-shelf and near her head, I saw a large golden star shining: the rolling of the ship was so slight that the star continued to shine in the aperture, sliding up and down, but never beyond the limits of the circle of window. The effect of the girl’s white face, and of this star that seemed to be sliding to and fro near it, was extraordinary. A strange fancy entered my head: I thought of the star as of Alice’s spirit hovering close to the form that was not yet inanimate, and waiting for death to give the signal for its flight to Heaven; and whilst I thus thought, looking at the white face and the golden star shining in the cabin window, a sweet low voice began to sing the opening lines of that beautiful hymn, ‘Abide with Me.’

The voice was faint and sounded as though it came from a distance, but it was inexpressibly sweet. I started, believing that someone was singing on deck, for the voice of anyone singing on deck would strike faintly upon the ear through the open cabin window, even as this voice did. Then I said to myself, ‘It is Alice who is singing,’ and stepping to her side I was in time to witness the movement of her lips ere she ceased, after having sung but little more than the first two lines of the hymn. Her eyes were closed, her hands remained crossed upon her bosom; she had not stirred, and there was no doubt that she sang in her sleep.

About this hour Mrs. Lee lifted her head from her pillow, then arose, and after gazing silently for awhile at her child, she approached me, put her lips to my ear, and bade me in almost breathless accents take the sleep I needed. I answered in a whisper that I could not sleep, and asked her to allow me to go on deck to breathe the cool air for a quarter of an hour or so, telling her where she would find me. She acquiesced with a motion of her head, and catching up a shawl I noiselessly passed out from the cabin.

The saloon lamps had long been extinguished, but a plentiful haze of starlight floated through the open skylights. Not knowing but that Mr. Harris might have charge of the ship, and desiring to avoid him, though even if he were on the poop and saw me there I did not suppose he would address me, I passed through the saloon on to the quarter-deck, and seated myself half-way up one of the ladders which conducted to the poop, and, my attire being dark, and the darkness where I sat being deep, there was small chance of my being observed unless someone came to the ladder to mount or descend it.

The night air was delicious. Low over the sea on my left hand side was a dark red scar of moon; it was floating slowly up out of the east with its fragment of disk large and distorted by the hot atmosphere through which it stared. The sails of the ship rose pale, and the topmost of them looked so high up that the faint pallid spaces seemed to be hovering cloud-like close under the stars. The faint breeze held the canvas motionless, and not a sound came from those airy heights.

The figure of a man moved on the forecastle; otherwise the decks--so much of them, at least, as my sight commanded--were tenantless. The night was the more peaceful for the soft air that blew. The delicate noise of rippling waters lulled the senses, and at another time I should have fallen asleep to that gentle music of the sea, but my heart was too full to suffer me to slumber then; the tears fell from my eyes. A sweet girl was dying; the gentlest heart that ever beat in a woman’s breast might even now, as I sat thinking, have ceased to throb; one whom I dearly loved, whose tenderness for me had been that of a sister, was dying, might even now be dead, and as I sat thinking of her I wept.

I looked up at the sky; it was crowded with stars, and many meteors glanced in the dark heights. I asked myself, ‘Where is Heaven?’ We look upwards and think that Heaven is where we direct our eyes, but I knew that even as I looked the prospect of the stars was slowly changing, so that if Heaven were _there_ where I was now gazing it would not be there presently. Where then was Heaven? And when the soul of the sweet girl who was dying in her cabin quitted her body whither would it fly? Then I remembered that she herself had told me that we looked upwards when we thought of Heaven because the light was there, the light of the sun, and the moon, and the stars, but that God whom she had taught me to remember and to pray to was everywhere.

This thought of God’s presence--for if He was everywhere He must be where I now was--awed me, and, rising from the step upon which I was seated, I knelt and prayed, weeping bitterly as I uttered the words which arose from my heart. I prayed that my memory might be restored to me; I prayed that, if I were a wife and a mother, the image of my husband and my children would be presented to me that I might know them and return to them. But I did not pray for Alice Lee. She was already His to whom I knelt, and I knew in my heart that even if it had been in the power of prayer to save her she would not desire another hour of life unless--and here I turned my head and looked at the dark surface of sea and thought of it as her grave.

I resumed the seat I had arisen from in order to kneel, and again surrendered myself to thought. I heard the measured tread of a man upon the poop-deck that stretched above and behind me. He came to the rail, and stood at the head of the steps which lay opposite to those on which I was seated. His figure showed black against the starless sky, and I saw that he was not Mr. Harris, but Mr. ----, the second officer of the vessel. He whistled softly to himself as he stood awhile surveying the sea and the ship.

One reads often in poetry and in stories of the loneliness of the night watch on the ocean; but one should bear a secret part in such a watch--a part such as I was now bearing, with a heart of lead and with eyes which burnt with recent tears--to compass what is meant when the loneliness of the night watch at sea is sung or written of. Nobody stirred upon the ship but the figure of this second officer and some dim shadowy shape far forward on the forecastle, flitting among and blending with the deep masses of dye cast upon the atmosphere there by the sails. Not a sound was to be heard saving the sigh of the faint wind in the rigging, and the tinkling noise of rippling water. The fragment of moon was still red in the east, and as yet without power to touch the dark ocean under it with light. Two bells were struck on some part of the deck, and the tremulous chimes went floating up into the hollows of the sails, and trembled in the pallid concavities in echoes. The figure of the second officer moved away from the rail; and now, though a little while before I had believed myself sleepless, my head insensibly sank forward, my eyes closed, and I slumbered.

I was awakened by a hand laid upon my shoulder. I started with a cry, and gazed around me. No situation would more bewilder one new to the sea than the being suddenly aroused and finding oneself on the deck of a ship, with the stars shining and the tall sails spreading over one, and the night wind of the deck blowing upon one’s face. The person who had awakened me was Mr. McEwan.

‘This is a strange bed for a lady to be sleeping upon at this hour of the night,’ said he; ‘but I have no heart and no time now to represent the folly ye commeet in sleeping in such a dew as is falling. I have been to see Miss Alice Lee; she is dying. She will be gone before that moon there has climbed to over our mast-heads. She wishes to see you, and her mother asked me to find and send you to her. Go and comfort the puir old lady. God knows she needs comfort! There is nothing I can do for the girl,’ and he abruptly quitted me, and disappeared in the gloom of the saloon.

I immediately made my way to Mrs. Lee’s cabin, but before entering I stood upon a chair that I might see the clock under the skylight. The time was a quarter to two. I was now able to read the clock, though when I had first come on board the _Deal Castle_, having no memory of the figures, I was unable to tell the time. I quietly opened the door and entered. Mrs. Lee was kneeling at the side of her sleeping-shelf, which was below the bunk in which her daughter lay, and she was so lost in prayer that she did not hear me enter. I crept to Alice’s side, and then her mother, perceiving me, arose.

Though the cabin lamp was turned down, there was plenty of light to see by. Alice’s eyes were closed, but after I had stood a moment or two looking at her she opened them, saw me and knew me, and a smile of touching sweetness lighted up her wasted face. She feebly moved her hand, but with a gesture which made me know she wished me to hold it. I bowed my head close to her face, and asked her in a whisper if she was in pain. She answered no; and then I asked her if she was happy, on which she looked at me and smiled. Her lips moved, but she seemed powerless to give expression to her thoughts. I bent my ear close to her mouth, and I heard her say in a whisper as dim and far off as the voice one hears in a dream:

‘I have been praying that God will give you back your memory----My beloved mother will be your friend----’

The whisper ceased, she smiled again, twitched her fingers that I might relax my hold of her hand, and looked at her mother, who took her hand and held it.

I withdrew to the chair in which I had been wont to keep a watch while Mrs. Lee slept, that the mother and daughter might, in that sacred time, be alone together. But the sweet girl never spoke again. Whilst her hand was still clasped by her mother she turned her face to the side of the ship and passed away, dying so quietly that her death was as noiseless as the fall of the leaf of a flower in the night--dying so quietly that her mother knew not when the soul of her child had fled, and continued holding her hand, with not a sound breaking the sacred stillness of that little cabin save the rippling of the water tinkling to the ear through the embrasure of the window, from whose dark disk the large golden star had gone.

‘Mark,’ says the most eloquent of divines, ‘mark the rain that falls from above, and the same shower that droppeth out of one cloud increaseth sundry plants in a garden, and severally according to the condition of every plant. In one stalk it makes a rose, in another a violet, divers in a third, and sweet in all. So the Spirit makes its multiformous effects in several complexions and all according to the increase of God.’

The rose of this fair garden was dead. But what says this same most eloquent of all divines, the rose being dead, and the perfume, which is its spirit, gone from it?

‘As when the eye meets with light it is the comfort of the eye: when the ear meets with harmony it is the comfort of the ear. What is the most transcendent consolation therefore but the union of the soul with God?’

Until long after the dawn had broken Mrs. Lee and I remained with the dead. The poor mother seemed at first stupefied. Mr. McEwan came in, looked at Alice, pronounced that all was over, and with a sigh and a gentle nod to Mrs. Lee softly quitted the cabin.

And then it was that the poor mother appeared to have been changed into stone. She held the dead girl’s hand, and kept her eyes fastened upon the averted face. At last a sob convulsed her. Another and a third followed, and, releasing her child’s hand, she threw herself into a chair, hid her face, and wept. Oh how she wept! and I feared that her heart had broken. Then, when she had calmed down somewhat, I took her hand and said whatever I thought might soothe her. But there was nothing under Heaven to soothe grief so recent as hers, with the body of her sweet daughter lying within view, though she may have found a sort of sympathy which no other person on board could have possessed for her in my own distressed condition; for from time to time as I talked she would lift her streaming eyes to my face with an expression of deep pity that for the moment overlay the look of her own grief. It was indeed as though she should say, ‘Great as is my sorrow here, seeking to comfort me is one whose sorrow may be even greater than mine.’

We passed the hours until some time after dawn had broken in prayer and in tears, and in whispering of the dead. Often the mother would rise to look at her, and then come back and talk to me about her--of the sweetness of her disposition even when she was a little child, of her tenderness and goodness as a daughter, of her simple innocent pleasures, of her tastes; how the poor whom she had visited and comforted loved her and blessed her name.

When the morning had fairly come I saw it was no longer fit that the poor bereaved mother should continue in this cabin in sight of her child’s body, so, telling her that I would presently return, I entered the saloon, and, seeing nothing of Mrs. Richards, I descended into the steerage and found her in her cabin. I told her that Alice Lee was dead. She heard me with a look of sorrow, but it was impossible that she should feel surprise. I told her that Mrs. Lee was nearly heartbroken, and begged that another cabin might be prepared for her where she might remain private until after the funeral. She reflected and said:

‘All the saloon cabins are occupied. It would not be right to offer her a berth in the steerage. I will speak to the captain at once; the surgeon is sure to have reported the poor young lady’s death to him; pray return to Mrs. Lee until I am able to tell you what can be done.’

Shortly after I had returned to Mrs. Lee’s cabin a number of the passengers came out of their berths, and the news that Alice Lee was dead swiftly went from mouth to mouth. Then it was, as I afterwards came to know, that Mrs. Webber, meeting Mrs. Richards as she came from the captain’s cabin, learnt from the stewardess that there was no berth vacant in the saloon for the reception of Mrs. Lee, and that the poor bereaved mother would have to retire for awhile to a cabin in the darksome steerage. The good-natured, sympathetic Mrs. Webber would not hear of this; she bade Mrs. Richards wait for a little, and going to one of the ladies she promptly arranged to share her berth with her; Mr. Webber and the lady’s husband sleeping meanwhile in cabins occupied by single men. All this Mrs. Webber promptly arranged. Her sympathetic enthusiasm swept away every difficulty, and before the breakfast-bell summoned the passengers to the saloon table Mrs. Lee and I were installed in the Webbers’ cabin.

The state of the weather required that the funeral should not be delayed, but I own that I was not a little shocked when I learnt that the ceremony was to take place at eleven that morning. I had met Captain Ladmore in the saloon as I came from my berth in the steerage to rejoin Mrs. Lee in her new quarters, and he stopped me to ask in his grave sad way how Mrs. Lee did, and to inquire after the last moments of the dear girl. I answered him as best I could, and then, seeing Mrs. Richards come out of the berth that had been occupied by Mrs. Lee, it entered my head to ask the captain when the funeral would take place.

‘I have arranged,’ said he, ‘that it shall take place at eleven.’

‘At eleven!--this morning?’ cried I, starting. ‘That is terribly soon, Captain Ladmore.’

‘It is terribly soon, as you say,’ he answered, ‘but at sea there is no sentiment, and the claims of the living at sea are far more imperious than ever they can be ashore. I do not wish to intrude upon Mrs. Lee. Her sorrow is too fresh to admit of intrusion. I will ask you to tell her that the funeral takes place at eleven, and you will also say that I too have suffered keenly, even as keenly as she, and that I feel for her,’ and, giving me a slight hurried bow to conceal his emotion, he left me.

I broke the intelligence as softly as I was able to the poor bereaved mother. A scared look entered her eyes, which were red with weeping, and she convulsively motioned with her arm as though she would speak but could not; she then hid her face in her hands and swayed her form as though she wrestled with the agony of her affliction. I stood at the port-hole, looking through it at the sea, but my eyes were blind with tears, and I could behold nothing but the image of Alice Lee, already draped, perhaps, in her sea-shroud--in less than two hours to have vanished for ever in that mighty sepulchre of ocean from which, as a grave, her pure sweet spirit had shrunk, so great was her horror of its vastness, albeit she knew that her Lord, in whom she believed and whom she loved, was awaiting and would receive her, though an ocean as wide as the heavens themselves rolled between her and Him. Presently I felt Mrs. Lee’s hand upon my arm.

‘Agnes, will you attend my darling’s funeral?’

‘If you wish it, dear Mrs. Lee, yes.’

‘I could not be present--I could not----. You will tell me----’ She broke down and wept upon my shoulder; but I readily gathered her thoughts from her grief-broken utterance.

Shortly before eleven I quitted her cabin. She looked me in the eyes and kissed me on the brow before I left her. I went to the berth that I had been occupying, but that I was to occupy no longer, and put on a black veil which Mrs. Lee had given to me to wear. I also put on a pair of black gloves which had belonged to sweet Alice Lee. I had no more mourning to wear. As I passed through the saloon I heard the sound of the ship’s bell tolling. It chimed in a funeral note, but the wide glory of the morning took all significance of grief out of it. The soft wind which had fanned the ship forward during the night still blew; the sun was within an hour of his meridian, and the rippling sea was a vast dazzling plain, a surface of white fire wrinkling southward. There could be nothing funereal in the tolling of a bell on such a morning as this; the life of the flashing universe was in every trembling pulse of the slowly recurring chimes.

The emigrants crowded the deck in the forward part of the ship. They stared with eager eyes, and every face wore an expression of vulgar, morbid curiosity. The children amongst them stared too, but they were silent and wondering, and often would they look up at the sails and around at the furniture of the ship, as though all familiar objects had been rendered fresh and strange to their young eyes. Most of the crew, in clean white attire, stood in ranks in front of the emigrants. Every man’s shadow softly swung at his feet, and just past and close behind one bushy-whiskered face was the tawny countenance of the gipsy woman, her eyes full of fire, and her mouth wide with a grin that seemed to fling a complexion of irony upon the serious, vulgar, and grimy faces round about in her neighbourhood.

The saloon passengers had clothed themselves in black. They were congregated on the quarter-deck, at a short distance from the part of the bulwark where the body was to be launched. The hour of eleven was struck, six blows on the bell announcing the time; and the captain, stalking gravely out of the saloon, Prayer-book in hand, took up his station close against the bulwarks, where the sailors had made an opening by lifting out a piece of the rail. A few moments later the body was borne forth from the saloon, and at the sight of it every man took off his hat, and a strange sound, like a subdued moan uttered by many persons at one instant, came from the crowd of emigrants.

The body was carried by four sailors; it was covered by a large flag--the red ensign of the English merchant service--and the crimson edges of the flag trailed along the white planks as the sailors, with measured tread, bore their sweet and sacred burthen to the bulwarks. The captain, opening his book, began to read the funeral service in a deep, clear voice; but often there was a tremor, often there was a break of emotion in his tones, which made those who knew how it had been with him feel that his heart was away with his own dead in the old home. Sobs often broke from the ladies.

So young! So sweet! So good! Whilst my eyes streamed with tears, and whilst my ears followed the touching words recited by the captain, my heart asked many questions. Why should one so gentle, so pure, so young, be taken? Why for years should she have been haunted by the terrible spectre of death, a shadow for ever creeping closer and closer to her, poising its certain and envenomed lance, for years haunting her hours and her dreams with its ever-growing apparition? Oh, how cruel! how hard to bear is the continuous dread and expectation of death! I thought. And when I remembered how she had answered me when I spoke aloud to her some such thoughts as were now running in my mind: how she had told me that the victory of the spirit over life, and all that life can tempt it with, is by suffering and pain; that the great triumph of our salvation was the fruit of suffering and of pain, the sweet, dear, glad voice spoke to me yet. I seemed to hear its pure accents creeping into my ear from the pale form hidden by the crimson flag. The voice told me that all was well with her, that the conquest was hers, that she had exchanged the dim pale shadows of this dream called life for the shining and glorious realities which had been promised to her by One whose word was Love, unfailing and imperishable, and that she was--as no one in this life can be--happy.

At a signal from the captain the flag was removed, the grating on which the body rested was tilted, and the body, sewn up in snow-white sail-cloth, flashed from the ship’s side.