foam; the waves leap short and high; the boat goes down these sharp and sudden hills of water, and is hurled back on its haunches by trying to mount the hills coming up on the other side of the hollow. How she staggers and falls down, and picks herself up and is knocked down again, and blindly rears and as blindly falls! Her freight has been chiefly left at Havana and Progresso, and so she behaves worse than she might have otherwise done. I had never seen so crazy a creature on the sea. I thought the long swells of the Atlantic, the short surges of the Mediterranean, and even the chopping waves of the English Channel and the Huron Bay bad enough, but this Mexican Norther excelled them all. Do you wish to pay that toll to see this garden? It will pay; for sea-sickness, like toothache, never kills.
There was not much done that day except to lurch with the lurching ship. "Now we go down, down, downy, and now we go up, up, uppy." Now on your back, and now on your face. Still we contrived to sit it through, and to have a good talk on religion with a Boston gentleman, who, like so many of his city, had no religion to talk about, being not Christian, nor even Pagan, not so much infidel, as faith-less: not anti-believing as non-believing. Like that ignorant backwoodsman who, being asked if he loved the Lord Jesus, honestly replies, "I've nothing agin him." Yet he that is not for Him, having known of Him, is against Him, and so non-Christianity is anti-Christianity.
How much is Christian faith needed in that Christian town! And what a record have they to meet who have taken away our Lord, and given the people a stolid self-reliance, or more stolid fatalistic indifference as their only religion! But our lively friend could sing—what Bostonian can not, since the Jubilee?—and he mingled "Stabat Mater," "Coronation," and camp-meeting melodies in a pure Yankee olla-podrida. May this song-gift yet lead the singer to the grace it springs from and to!
Toward night the winds and waves abated slightly, and after midnight they lulled to sleep. But long after the Norther had blown itself away, the waves rolled slow and steady but deep and
