pt cool, sir, we might every one of us have been riddled
with rifle-bullets."

I felt still greater pain when I went to the side of little Harry
Sumner's cot. He was in the officers' sick-bay, and the doctor had done
his best to make him comfortable. He was slumbering, so I did not
speak. I stood for some minutes watching his youthful countenance. It
was almost feminine in its beauty--so clear, so fair, so free from the
effects of the evil passions which distort and disfigure so often the
features of those of older years. His long light-brown hair had fallen
off his clear broad forehead, and his lips were parted, and moved
slightly, as if he were speaking to himself. A sickly gleam of light
from the ship's lanthorn, which hung from a beam above, fell on his
countenance, and gave it a hue so pallid that I thought the shades of
death were fast gathering over him. My heart sank within me. Were his
anticipations, then, of evil so soon to be realised? Of evil? Would
it, indeed, be an evil to him, poor child, to be removed from all the
temptations to vice, from the scenes of violence and wrong with which he
was surrounded? I felt it would not, and still I could not bear the
thought of losing him; and there was another, far, far away, who would
mourn him still more--his mother. Who would have the courage to tell
her that she would see her boy no more? I trusted that I might not have
the painful task to perform. I prayed earnestly, for his widowed
mother's sake, that he might recover; that he might go through his fiery
trials in the world unscathed; that he might withstand the world, the
flesh, and the devil, and, through the merits of our Master, attain
eternal happiness in the end. The surgeon entered the sick-bay. I
signed to him that the boy was sleeping.

"What do you think of his case, doctor?" said I with an anxious face.
"Will he recover?"

"If fever does not set in he'll do," answered the medico. "McCallum
will keep a constant watch on him during the night. He'll call me if
any change takes place. Ye need not fash yourself, Hurry; the boy is in
no danger, I tell you."

These words consoled me. Still I was not perfectly satisfied. The
heart of a sailor, far removed as he is from the social influences of
the shore, looks out for something on which to set its more tender
affections.

I felt for that lone boy as if he had been a young brother or sister.
My feelings were, I dare say, shared by man