"Tired nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep! The previous night had exhibited some signs of an approaching hurricane, and she remembered that her husband was then on the faithless element. As the darkness thickened around her, she had felt rather uneasy, and was unable to quell the in. voluntary apprehensions that agitated her mind; but still she endeavoured to be com forted, and her efforts were not altogether unavailing. With the morning sun, however, and long before he was visible, for his beams only broke out at short and casual intervals during the day, poor Blanche left her pillow. Then were her devotions not forgotten. Her Bible lay open beside her bed -for Blanche and her husband had not neglected to study its healing page. The passage that caught her eye was in the Acts. Possibly, she had unconsciously turned to it, for the description of the danger of the vessel, which bore the Apostle of the Gentiles on his way, seemed to be in melancholy unison with her unadmitted fears. She read, and as I have been told, the marks of her tears were afterwards seen upon the page But not long after, there arose against it a tempestuous wind, and when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the wind, we let her drive. And being exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day they lightened the ship. And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no small tempest lay on us, all hopes that we should be saved was then taken away.' When she reached the concluding words, she closed the volume, and as she went out to examine the signs of the heavens,' sang a hymn which she knew her husband loved : Spent with toil, upon a pillow The Redeemer laid his head : Wild beneath him rose the billow :-- Rose and rudely rocked his bed, H Dreading now the gulph---for faster He arose: alarmed they found him Thus, when tossing on the ocean, Saviour! may I still be near thee, See thy form, and hear thy voice: The skies were still menacing in their aspect, and the blast sounded mournfully, as if death were on its wings. She returned, and read again: And so it came to pass * Mark iv. 38. that they all escaped safe to land.' Here Blanche shut the Bible: and fain would she have drawn consolation from the deliverance experienced by the Apostle and his companions-but her apprehensions were now awakened—and they never subsided more! As soon as she had prepared her children's meals for the day-they were simple and required neither much art nor timeshe withdrew from her cottage-that abode in which life had so often been sweet to her -and went down to the beach, where she wandered without any thing to eat, and with only the water of the brook to allay her burning thirst. The sun broke out for an instant from the dense clouds that enveloped him, and his position in the hemis phere for every hill and tree is a dial to one, accustomed to watch the bright orb as he goes rejoicing on his way, and to converse with him in the retirements of natural scenery told her it was noon. A sail now appeared in the horizon. She gazed on it with a straining eye. It came, and passed -it brought not her husband, nor bore any tidings of the vessel he commanded. Another rose to her sight-I had myself seen them as they moved upon the wave, and and had thought in silence of the dangers to which they are exposed who 'go down to the deep in ships, and do their business in the great waters'-still it was not her husband's ;-but the death signal, a flag flying inverted when any of the crew has been lost, was on its mast. Blanche trembled as she beheld it; and running with all the haste with which her exhausted limbs could carry her to a boat that put off from it, and landed a sailor in a little creek beside her, she inquired for "The Aurora"and for him, too, the captain of the gallant bark. The mariner was silent.-His heart was full; for he had come on shore for the very purpose of breaking the melancholy catastrophe to the widow of him who now lay buried beneath the wave. He had not expected to be thus taken by surprise; and |
