“Nor o’er many clean faces, I take it,” saith Father.
“Ah! did you hear, Sir,” saith Mynheer, “of Mynheer Heningsen’s voyage to Greenland the last year?”
“I have not, Mynheer,” saith Father. “Pray you, what was notable therein?”
“Ah! he was not far from the coast of Greenland, when he found the ship go out of her course. He turned the rudder, or how you say, to guide the ship—I am not sea-learned, I ask your pardon if I mistake—but the ship would not move. Then they found, beneath a sunken rock, and it was—how you say?—magnetical, that drew to it the iron of the ship. Then Mynheer Heningsen, he look to his charts, for he know no rock just there. And what think you he found? Why, two hundred years back, exactly—in the year of our Lord 1380, there were certain Venetians, the brothers Zeni, sailing in these seas, and they brought word home to Venice that on this very spot, where Heningsen found nothing but a sunken rock, they found a beautiful large island, where were one hundred villages, inhabited by Christian people, in a state of great civility (civilisation), but so simple and guileless that hardly you can conceive. Think you! nothing now but a sunken rock.”
“But what name hath the island?” asks Hal.
“No name at all. No eyes ever saw it but the brothers Zeni of Venice.”
“Nay, Mynheer, I cry you mercy,” saith Father of his thoughtful fashion. “If the brothers Zeni told truth (as I mean to signify no doubt), there was One that saw it, from the time when He pronounced all things very good, to the day when some convulsion of nature, whatso it were, by His commandment engulfed that fair isle in the waters. ‘Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did He,—in heaven, and in earth, and in the sea, and in all deep places.’ Not one hair from the head of those unknown Christians, that were Christians in truth, perished in those North waters. We shall know it when we meet them in the Land that is very far off.”
Selwick Hall, October ye xxxi.
Mine hand was so weary when I was come to the last sentence afore this, that I set down no more. Truly, there was little at after that demerited the same.
And now I be come to the end of my month, I have been a-reading over what I writ, to see how much I must needs pay. There be but two blots, the which shall be so many pence: and two blank spaces of one week or over, the which at two pence each brings the account to sixpence. I cannot perceive that I have at any time writ disrespectfully of my betters—which, I take it, be Father, and Mother, and Aunt Joyce, and Cousin Bess, and Mynheer Stuyvesant, But for speaking unkindly of other, I fear I am not blameless. I can count six two-pences, which shall be one shilling and sixpence. I must try and do better when my month cometh round again. Verily, I had not thought that I should speak unkindly six times in one month! ’Tis well to find out a body’s faults.