"She taught me to pray," added the captain, speaking a little thick, "but since I've been in this London line, to own the truth, I find but little time for any thing but hard work, until, for want of practice, praying has got to be among the hardest things I can turn my hand to."
"That is the way with all of us; it is my opinion, Captain Truck, these London and Liverpool liners will have a good many lost souls to answer for."
"Ay, ay, if we could put it on them, it would do well enough; but my honest old father always maintained, that every man must stand in the gap left by his own sins; though he did assert, also, that we were all fore-ordained to shape our courses starboard or port, even before we were launched."
"That doctrine makes an easy tide's-way of life; for I see no great use in a man's carrying sail and jamming himself up in the wind, to claw off immoralities, when he knows he is to fetch up upon them after all his pains."
"I have worked all sorts of traverses to get hold of this matter, and never could make any thing of it. It is harder than logarithms. If my father had been the only one to teach it, I should have thought less about it, for he was no scholar, and might have been paying it out just in the way of business; but then my mother believed it, body and soul, and she was too good a woman to stick long to a course that had not truth to back it."
"Why not believe it heartily, sir, and let the wheel fly? One gets to the end of the v'y'ge on this tack as well as on another."
"There is no great difficulty in working up to or even through the passage of death, Leach, but the great point is to know the port we are to moor in finally. My mother taught me to pray, and when I was ten I had underrun all the Commandments, knew the Lord's Creed, and the Apostles' Prayer, and had made a handsome slant into the Catechism; but, dear me, dear me, it has all oozed out of me, like the warmth from a Greenlander."
"Folks were better educated in your time, Captain Truck, than they are now-a-days, by all I can learn."
"No doubt of that in the world. In my time, younkers were taught respect for their betters, and for age, and their Catechism, and piety, and the Apostles' Prayer, and all those sort of things. But America has fallen astern sadly in manners within the last fifty years. I do not flatter myself with being as good as I was when under my excellent dear mother's command, but there are worse men in the world, and out of Newgate, too, than John Truck. Now, in the way of vices, Leach, I never swear."
"Not you, sir; and Mr. Monday never drinks."