"Keep to the question, mistress!" said Ned, with a playful twinkle in his bright blue eye. "I didn't ask whether it would be safe for Bill to take Sir Lacy's purse, out of love for his mother, or kindness for me, but whether it would be right for him to be generous at the expense of another man."
"Taking a purse! That would be downright stealing!" cried Bessy.
"And are not the wood and the labour he pays for, as much the carpenter's property, as the purse is Sir Lacy Barton's? Is it not just as wrong to rob the one as the other?"
"I never knew a man with such particular notions as you have!" cried Bessy, tossing her head. "You're always pulling one up sharp with the question whether a thing is right!"
"Because," said Ned Franks, gravely, "we have to do with a righteous God. Mind you, Bessy, the Bible is the only chart as is given us to steer by, and when one sees in that chart, 'provide things honest in the sight of all men,' *—'He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much, and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much,' † one learns that the safe channel is a very narrow channel indeed, and that if we don't carefully keep the right course, we shall run the vessel aground."
* Rom. xii. 17. † Luke xvi. 10
"Well," said Bessy, as she laid out some linen to iron, "I for one will never believe that the great God above ever notices such little matters as these you speak of."
"Maybe you'd have thought it a little matter for Eve to pluck a fruit, but 'twas a matter that let in death and misery into a world," said Ned. "The skipper of the first craft as ever I sailed in, thought it a little matter when, one evening, our vessel just touched on a rock, as he fancied; he smoked his pipe, drank his grog, and turned into his cabin, and never dreamed of the small leak down below, till he was wakened in the morning with the cry of 'Three feet water in the hold!' The vessel was as nigh lost as could be, with all the hands on board. And 'tis so with our souls, Bessy Peele. The little sins, as we call them, are the little leaks in the timber, and if one goes to the bottom, 'tis all the same, whether the water came in by a big hole or a small one."
Bessy banged down her hot iron on the shirt before her with a noise and bustle which seemed to say, "I want no more of this preaching."
Ned Franks quietly dipped his pen again and went on with his letter.