e was to be bound
apprentice to a captain sailing from Portsmouth in a whaling ship. He
learned rather from what was said _near_ him, than _to_ him, that this
man wanted a cabin boy, but would not have one who was not bound to him,
or to use the more expressive language in which it reached the ears of
his destined victim, "one with whom he could not do as he pleased."

He who had come within the poor-house walls at six years old, a glad,
rosy-cheeked, chubby child, went from them at eight, thin, and pale, and
grave, with a frame broken by want and labor, a mind clouded, and a
heart repressed by unkindness. But, sad as was the history of those
years, the succeeding two taught the poor boy to regard them as the
vanished brightness of a dream. The man--we should more justly say, the
fiend--to whom the next fourteen years of his life were by bond devoted,
was a savage by nature, and had been rendered yet more brutal by habits
of intoxication. In his drunken orgies, his favorite pastime was to
torture the unfortunate being whom the "guardians of the poor" of an
English parish had placed in his power. It would make the heart of the
reader sick, were we to attempt a detail of the many horrible inventions
by which this modern Caligula amused his leisure hours, and made life
hideous to his victim. Nor was it only from this arch-fiend that the
poor boy suffered. Mate, cook, and sailors, soon found in him a butt for
their jokes, an object on which they might safely vent their ill-humor,
and a convenient cover for their own delinquencies.

He was beaten for and by them. The evil qualities which man had himself
elicited from his nature, if not implanted there--the sullenness, and
hardiness, and cunning he evinced, were made an excuse for further
injury. During his first voyage of eighteen months, spite of all this,
hope was not entirely dead in his heart. The ship was to return to
England, and he determined to run away from her, and find his way back
to the poor-house. It was a miserable refuge, but it was his only one.
He escaped--he found his way thither through many dangers--he told his
story. It was heard with incredulity, and he was returned to his
tormentors, to learn that there is even in hell "a deeper hell."

Again he went on a whaling voyage. Day after day the fathomless, the
seemingly illimitable sea, the image of the Infinite was around him--but
his darkened mind saw in it only a prison, which shut him in with his
pers