While one of the masters of the sealing crafts was drawing these pictures, in his imagination, of wealth after his manner, very different were the thoughts of the other.  Roswell’s fancy carried him far across that blue and sparkling ocean, northward, to Oyster Pond, and Deacon Pratt’s homestead, and to Mary.  He saw the last in her single hearted simplicity, her maiden modesty, her youthful beauty,—­nay, even in her unyielding piety; for, singular as it may seem, Gardiner valued his mistress so much the more for that very faith to which, in his own person, he laid no claim.  Irreligious he was not, himself, though skeptical on the one great tenet of Christianity.  But, in Mary, it struck him it was right that she should believe that which she had been so sedulously taught; for he did not at all fancy those inquiring minds, in the other sex, that lead their possessors in quest of novelties and paradoxes.  In this humour, then, the reader will not be surprised to hear that he imagined the deacon’s niece in her most pleasing attributes, and bedecked her with all those charms that render maidens pleasant to youthful lovers.  Had Mary been less devout, less fixed in her belief that Jesus was the Son of God; strange as it may seem, the skeptical young man would have loved her less.

And what was that rugged, uncultivated seaman, who stood near the two officers, thinking of, all this time?  Did he, too, bend his thoughts on love, and profit, and the pleasures of this world?  Of love, most truly, was his heart full to overflowing; but it was the love of God, with that affection for all his creatures, that benevolence and faith, which glow as warmly in the hearts of the humblest and least educated, as in those of the great and learned.  His mind was turned towards his Creator, and it converted the extraordinary view that lay before his sight into a vast, magnificent, gorgeous, though wild temple, for his worship and honour.  It might be well for all of us occasionally to pause in our eager pursuit of worldly objects, and look around on the world itself, considering it as but a particle in the illimitable fields of creation,—­one among the many thousands of other known worlds, that have been set in their places in honour of the hand that made them.  These brief but vivid glances at the immensity of the moral space which separates man from his Deity, have very healthful effects in inculcating that humility which is the stepping-stone of faith and love.

After passing an hour on the bald cap of the mountain, sometimes conversing, at others ruminating on the scene, a change in the weather induced our party to move.  There had been flurries of snow visible all the morning, but it was in the distance, and among the glittering bergs.  Once the volcano had thus been shut in from view; but now a driving cloud passed over the mountain itself, which was quickly as white as the pure element could make it.  So heavy was the fall of snow, that it was soon impossible to see a dozen yards, and of course the whole of the plain of the island was concealed.  At this most inauspicious moment, our adventurers undertook their descent.