“I speak as them speak among whom I’ve been forced to live.  The forecastle and steward’s pantry, Stephen Spike, are poor schools to send women to l’arn language in.”

“Try and forget it all, poor Molly!  Say to me, so that I can hear you, `I forget and forgive, Stephen.’  I am afraid God will not pardon my sins, which begin to seem dreadful to me, if my own wife refuse to forget and forgive, on my dying bed.”

Jack was much mollified by this appeal.  Her interest in her offending husband had never been entirely extinguished.  She had remembered him, and often with woman’s kindness, in all her wanderings and sufferings, as the preceding parts of our narrative must show; and though resentment had been mingled with the grief and mortification she felt at finding how much he still submitted to Rose’s superior charms, in a breast as really generous and humane as that of Jack Tier’s, such a feeling was not likely to endure in the midst of a scene like that she was now called to witness.  The muscles of her countenance twitched, the hard-looking, tanned face began to lose its sternness, and every way she appeared like one profoundly disturbed.

“Turn to Him whose goodness and marcy may sarve you, Stephen,” she said, in a milder and more feminine tone than she had used now for years, making her more like herself than either her husband or Rose had seen her since the commencement of the late voyage; “my sayin’ that I forget and forgive cannot help a man on his death-bed.”

“It will settle my mind, Molly, and leave me freer to turn my thoughts to God.”

Jack was much affected, more by the countenance and manner of the sufferer, perhaps, than by his words.  She drew nearer to the side of her husband’s pallet, knelt, took his hands, and said solemnly,

“Stephen Spike, from the bottom of my heart, I do forgive you; and I shall pray to God that he will pardon your sins as freely and more marcifully than I now pardon all, and try to forget all that you have done to me.”

Spike clasped his hands, and again he tried to pray; but the habits of a whole life are not to be thrown off at will; and he who endeavours to regain, in his extremity, the moments that have been lost, will find, in bitter reality, that he has been heaping mountains on his own soul, by the mere practice of sin, which were never laid there by the original fall of his race.  Jack, however, had disburthened her spirit of a load that had long oppressed it, and, burying her face in the rug, she wept.

“I wish, Molly,” said the dying man, several minutes later, “I wish I had never seen the brig.  Until I got that craft, no thought of wronging human being ever crossed my mind.”

“It was the Father of Lies that tempts all to do evil, Stephen, and not the brig which caused the sins.”

“I wish I could live a year longer—­only one year; that is not much to ask for a man who is not yet sixty.”