The night was coming in cold and still.  It was one of those last efforts of winter in which all the terrible force of the season was concentrated:  and it really appeared as if nature, wearied with its struggle to return to a more genial temperature, yielded in despair, and was literally returning backwards through the coldest of her months.  The moon was young, but the stars gave forth a brightness that is rarely seen, except in the clear cold nights of a high latitude.  Each and all of these sublime emblems of the power of God were twinkling like bright torches glowing in space; and the mind had only to endow each with its probable or known dimensions, its conjectural and reasonable uses, to form a picture of the truest sublimity in which man is made to occupy his real position.  In this world, where, in a certain sense, he is master, where all things are apparently under his influence, if not absolutely subject to his control; where little that is distinctly visible is to be met with that does seem to be created to meet his wants, or to be wholly at his disposal, one gets a mistaken and frequently a fatal notion of his true place in the scale of the beings who are intended to throng around the footstool of the Almighty.  As the animalculae of the atmospheric air bear a proportion to things visible, so would this throng seem to bear a proportion to our vague estimates of the spiritual hosts.  All this Roswell was very capable of feeling, and in some measure of appreciating; and never before had he been made so conscious of his own insignificance, as he became while looking on the firmament that night, glowing with its bright worlds and suns, doubtless the centres of other systems in which distance swallowed up the lesser orbs.

Almost every one has heard or read of that collection of stars which goes by the name of the Southern Cross.  The resemblance to the tree on which Christ suffered is not particularly striking, though all who navigate the southern hemisphere know it, and recognize it by its imputed appellation.  It now attracted Roswell’s gaze; and coming as it did after so much reading, so many conversations with Stephen, and addressing itself to one whose heart was softened by the fearful circumstances that had so long environed the sealers, it is not surprising that it brought our young master to meditate seriously on his true condition in connection with the atonement that he was willing to admit had been made for him, in common with all of earth, at the very moment he hesitated to believe that the sufferer was, in any other than a metaphorical sense, the Son of God.

It is not our intention to describe more of the religious for me.  Where there is the same knowledge, there is too much companionship, like, for worship and reverence.”

“But we are told that man was created after the image of God.”

“In his likeness, Captain Gar’ner—­with some of the Divine Spirit, but not with all.  That makes him different from the brutes, and immortal.  I have convarsed with a clergyman who thinks that the angels, and archangels, and other heavenly beings, are far before even the Saints in Heaven, such as have been only men on ’arth.”