He went hastily on deck, half dressed and nearly frantic through fear,
to ascertain his opinion of the probable extent of the danger to which
they were exposed. But, alas! the old man, who had been placed at the
helm as the only person capable of conducting the vessel in so perilous
a situation, had been swept overboard by one of the early surges. He
spoke to many, but none seemed disposed to listen to him; each person
being too much engaged with his own concerns to attend to those of
others.
Every hand seemed paralyzed; the vessel without a steersman at the
helm--without a sailor to haul down a shroud, was cleaving the ocean at
the mercy of the winds and the waves!
His sense of guilt at this moment was overpowering; hitherto (partly
occasioned by ignorance, and partly by depraved habits of life) a degree
of thoughtlessness had possessed him, which it is almost impossible to
conceive could reign in the breast of a being endued with reason. Now
indeed his eyes were open to his fate--to his earthly fate; a strange
foreboding came upon him; it was a species of instinctive horror; he
could not look beyond it. Whether there was a being who ruled the world,
or whether there was not, had never been the subject of his meditations;
yet a secret whisper intimated to him that death would not be the bound
of his hopes and his fears--of his joys and his sorrows.
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