“Light ho, sir! I sees it all. He’s got me, an’ He’ll never let me go. Oh! why didn’t I know of this afore?”
He was a saved man. Let those argue who will, dispute who can, Johnny Wilson was a standing proof of the power of God to save the most ignorant, the most callous of the sons of men. From that day forward, without any more teaching, save what he could get from any one who would read the Gospels to him, he grew in grace. He was no more trouble aboard. His work was always done to the best of his ability, and you could safely trust him to work by himself, for, as he said: “My Jesus is alonger me alwus.”
Oh, but he was a real saint! Nothing could move him. He used to be hated by everybody—now he became the spoiled child of the fo’c’stle, at least in intent, for really he was unspoilable; but all hands, no matter what they thought, conspired to love Johnny. And when on the subsequent voyage he died of a blow received in falling from aloft, all hands gathered round his bunk, to hear from him the story that had transformed his life. He gushed it out with his latest breath:
“Jesus Christ, God’s Son, come down from heaven to look for me an’ make me happy. I wasn’t worth a rope-yarn to anybody, but He come and found me, an’ made me so glad. An’ now I’m a-goin’ ter see Him. Dear Jesus Christ, the friend of pore devils like me.”
“MY NIGHT WATCH IS OVER”
“MY NIGHT WATCH IS OVER.”
A SAILOR’S CONVERSION.
Sitting upon the capstan in the centre of the fo’c’s’le-head of a huge four-masted ship rushing swiftly along the wide, wild stretch of the Southern Ocean, bound to England round Cape Horn, a young able seaman in the prime of life was engaged in the unusual mental exercise for seamen of meditating upon God. His name does not matter; it must be sufficient to say that he was brought up in a respectable middle-class home in the north of England, one of a family of seven,—four boys and three girls. He had been christened at the parish church, attended Sunday-school and family prayers with the utmost regularity, and had been confirmed at an early age. In spite of occasional outbreaks of wildness, he had won prizes for exemplary conduct at Sunday-school, and had felt, with the mistaken idea of so many, when he received them, as if somebody were trying to bribe him to give up all the fun in life and become a strait-laced, long-visaged humbug. But he also felt, thank God! that in his life there were two solid facts that could never be explained away, standing up like bastions of native rock in his life,—the love of his mother and the kindness of his father.
All that he heard in church and Sunday-school was readily relegated by him to the category of things that ought to be done, even if you couldn’t see the use of them; but as to trying to understand them, well, that was the merest nonsense. Not that he ever put these thoughts and feelings into words, but they were none the less real to him.
Then, suddenly, without any previous preparation discernible by him, a foreign element came into his life. Coming home from the village school one afternoon (he was then thirteen years old), he met a bronzed, weather-beaten man who inquired of him the way to a neighboring town; and as that way for some little distance happened to be his own, they walked together. Within ten minutes the boy had imbibed from the wayfarer an intense desire to go a-roving. For the weather-beaten stranger was a sailor returning home after an absence of many years; and the plain recital of his adventures, without any attempt to enhance their interest, fired the country boy’s blood to such an extent that his breath came in short gasps, and he gazed at the seamed and sunburnt face beside him as if he could see in it some reflection of the wondrous scenes through which it had passed apparently unheeding. They parted; but the boy, his brain all in a ferment with wonder and desire, returned to his home as one that treads the clouds. And that night he waylaid his father, saying stammeringly: “Dad, I want to go to sea.”