I knew I hadn’t any right to pray expecting to be heard; but yet mine would be the prayer of the humble, and wasn’t Faith of as much consequence as a sparrow?  By-and-by, as we all sat leaning over the gunwale, the words of a hymn that I’d heard at camp-meetings came into my mind, and I sang them out, loud and clear.  I always had a good voice, though Dan ’d never heard me do anything with it except hum little low things, putting mother to sleep; but here I had a whole sky to sing in, and the hymns were trumpet-calls.  And one after another they kept thronging up, and there was a rush of feeling in them that made you shiver, and as I sang them they thrilled me through and through.  Wide as the way before us was, it seemed to widen; I felt myself journeying with some vast host towards the city of God, and its light poured over us, and there was nothing but joy and love and praise and exulting expectancy in my heart.  And when the hymn died on my lips because the words were too faint and the tune was too weak for the ecstasy, and when the silence had soothed me back again, I turned and saw Dan’s lips bitten, and his cheek white, and his eyes like stars, and Mr. Gabriel’s face fallen forward in his hands, and he shaking with quick sobs; and as for Faith,—­Faith, she had dropped asleep, and one arm was thrown above her head, and the other lay where it had slipped from Mr. Gabriel’s loosened grasp.  There’s a contagion, you know, in such things, but Faith was never of the catching kind.

Well, this wasn’t what we’d come for,—­turning all out-doors into a church,—­though what’s a church but a place of God’s presence? and for my part, I never see high blue sky and sunshine without feeling that.  And all of a sudden there came a school of mackerel splashing and darkening and curling round the boat, after the bait we’d thrown out on anchoring.  ’Twould have done you good to see Dan just at that moment; you’d have realized what it was to have a calling.  He started up, forgetting everything else, his face all flushed, his eyes like coals, his mouth tight and his tongue silent; and how many hooks he had out I’m sure I don’t know, but he kept jerking them in by twos and threes, and finally they bit at the bare barb and were taken without any bait at all, just as if they’d come and asked to be caught.  Mr. Gabriel, he didn’t pay any attention at first, but Dan called to him to stir himself, and so gradually he worked back into his old mood; but he was more still and something sad all the rest of the morning.  Well, when we’d gotten about enough, and they were dying in the boat there, as they cast their scales, like the iris, we put in-shore; and building a fire, we cooked our own dinner and boiled our own coffee.  Many’s the icy winter-night I’ve wrapped up Dan’s bottle of hot coffee in rolls on rolls of flannel, that he might drink it hot and strong far out at sea in a wherry at daybreak!