"
"She taught me to pray," added the captain, speaking a little thick, "but
since I've been in this London line, to own the truth, I find but little
time for any thing but hard work, until, for want of practice, praying has
got to be among the hardest things I can turn my hand to."
"That is the way with all of us; it is my opinion, Captain Truck, these
London and Liverpool liners will have a good many lost souls to
answer for."
"Ay, ay, if we could put it on them, it would do well enough; but my
honest old father always maintained, that every man must stand in the gap
left by his own sins; though he did assert, also, that we were all
fore-ordained to shape our courses starboard or port, even before we were
launched."
"That doctrine makes an easy tide's-way of life; for I see no great use in
a man's carrying sail and jamming himself up in the wind, to claw off
immoralities, when he knows he is to fetch up upon them after all
his pains."
"I have worked all sorts of traverses to get hold of this matter, and
never could make any thing of it. It is harder than logarithms. If my
father had been the only one to teach it, I should have thought less about
it, for he was no scholar, and might have been paying it out just in the
way of business; but then my mother believed it, body and soul, and she
was too good a woman to stick long to a course that had not truth to
back it.
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