The first watch of the night was marked by no change.  Wilder had joined his passengers, cheerful, and with that air of enjoyment which every officer of the sea is more or less wont to exhibit, when he has disengaged his vessel from the dangers of the land, and has fairly launched her on the trackless and fathomless abyss of the ocean.  He no longer alluded to the hazards of the passage, but strove, by the thousand nameless assiduities which his station enabled him to man fest, to expel all recollection of had passed from their minds.  Mrs Wyllys lent herself to his evident efforts to remove their apprehensions and one, ignorant of what had occurred between them, would have thought the little party, around the evening’s repast, was a contented and unsuspecting group of travellers, who had commenced their enterprise under the happiest auguries.

Still there was that, in the thoughtful eye and clouded brow of the governess, as at times she turned her bewildered look on our adventurer, which denoted a mind far from being at ease.  She listened to the gay and peculiar, because professional, sallies of the young mariner, with smiles that were indulgent while they were melancholy, as though his youthful spirits, exhibited as they were by touches of a humour that was thoroughly and quaintly nautical recalled familiar, but sad, images to her fancy Gertrude had less alloy in her pleasure.  Home, with a beloved and indulgent father, were before her; and she felt, while the ship yielded to each fresh impulse of the wind, as if another of those weary miles which had so long separated them, was already conquered.

During these short but pleasant hours, the adventurer who had been so oddly called into the command of the Bristol trader, appeared in a new character.  Though his conversation was characterized by the frank manliness of a seaman, it was, nevertheless tempered by the delicacy of perfect breeding.  The beautiful mouth of Gertrude often struggled to conceal the smiles which played around her lips and dimpled her cheeks, like a soft air ruffling the surface of some limpid spring; and once or twice, when the humour of Wilder came unexpectedly across her youthful fancy, she was compelled to yield to the impulses of an irresistible merriment.

One hour of the free intercourse of a ship can do more towards softening the cold exterior in which the world encrusts the best of human feelings, than weeks of the unmeaning ceremonies of the land.  He who has not felt this truth, would do well to distrust his own companionable qualities.  It would seem that man, when he finds himself in the solitude of the ocean, feels the deepest how great is his dependancy on others for happiness.  Then it is that he yields to sentiments with which he trifled, in the wantonness of abundance, and is glad to seek relief in the sympathies of his kind.  A community of hazard makes a community of interest, whether person or property composes the stake.  Perhaps a meta-physical and a too literal,