returning backwards through the coldest of her months. The moon was young,
but the stars gave forth a brightness that is rarely seen, except in the
clear cold nights of a high latitude. Each and all of these sublime
emblems of the power of God were twinkling like bright torches glowing in
space; and the mind had only to endow each with its probable or known
dimensions, its conjectural and reasonable uses, to form a picture of the
truest sublimity in which man is made to occupy his real position. In this
world, where, in a certain sense, he is master, where all things are
apparently under his influence, if not absolutely subject to his control;
where little that is distinctly visible is to be met with that does seem
to be created to meet his wants, or to be wholly at his disposal, one gets
a mistaken and frequently a fatal notion of his true place in the scale of
the beings who are intended to throng around the footstool of the
Almighty. As the animalculae of the atmospheric air bear a proportion to
things visible, so would this throng seem to bear a proportion to our
vague estimates of the spiritual hosts. All this Roswell was very capable
of feeling, and in some measure of appreciating; and never before had he
been made so conscious of his own insignificance, as he became while
looking on the firmament that night, glowing with its bright worlds and
suns, doubtless the centres of other systems in which distance swallowed
up the lesser orbs.

Almost every one has heard or read of that collection of stars which goes
by the name of the Southern Cross. The resemblance to the tree on which
Christ suffered is not particularly striking, though all who navigate the
southern hemisphere know it, and recognize it by its imputed appellation.
It now attracted Roswell's gaze; and coming as it did after so much
reading, so many conversations with Stephen, and addressing itself to one
whose heart was softened by the fearful circumstances that had so long
environed the sealers, it is not surprising that it brought our young
master to meditate seriously on his true condition in connection with the
atonement that he was willing to admit had been made for him, in common
with all of earth, at the very moment he hesitated to believe that the
sufferer was, in any other than a metaphorical sense, the Son of God.

It is not our intention to describe more of the religious for me. Where
there is the same knowledge, there is too much companionship,