some months
longer.

In this way did our young man employ-himself until he found his strength
perfectly restored. But the severe illness he had gone through, with the
sad views it had given him of some future day, when he might be
compelled to give up life itself, without a friendly hand to smooth his
pillow, or to close his eyes, led him to think far more seriously than
he had done before, on the subject of the true character of our
probationary condition here on earth, and on the unknown and awful
future to which it leads us. Mark had been carefully educated on the
subject of religion, and was well enough disposed to enter into the
inquiry in a suitable spirit of humility; but, the grave circumstances
in which he was now placed, contributed largely to the clearness of his
views of the necessity of preparing for the final change. Cut off, as he
was, from all communion with his kind; cast on what was, when he first
knew it, literally a barren rock in the midst of the vast Pacific Ocean,
Mark found himself, by a very natural operation of causes, in much
closer communion with his Creator, than he might have been in the haunts
of the world. On the Reef, there was little to divert his thoughts from
their true course; and the very ills that pressed upon him, became so
many guides to his gratitude by showing, through the contrasts, the many
blessings which had been left him by the mercy of the hand that had
struck him. The nights in that climate and season were much the
pleasantest portions of the four-and-twenty hours. There were no
exhalations from decayed vegetable substances or stagnant pools, to
create miasma, but the air was as pure and little to be feared under a
placid moon as under a noon-day sun. The first hours of night,
therefore, were those in which our solitary man chose to take most of
his exercise, previously to his complete restoration to strength; and
then it was that he naturally fell into an obvious and healthful
communion with the stars.

So far as the human mind has as yet been able to penetrate the mysteries
of our condition here on-earth, with the double connection between the
past and the future, all its just inferences tend to the belief in an
existence of a vast and beneficent design. We have somewhere heard, or
read, that the gipsies believe that men are the fallen angels, oiling
their way backward on the fatal path along which hey formerly rushed to
perdition. This may not be, probably is not tr