The Sea Lions; Or, The Lost Sealers

by James Fenimore Cooper

Close was the siege that was laid to Deacon Pratt, during the last week of his life. Many were the hints given of the necessity of his making a will, though the brother and sister, estimating their rights as the law established them, said but little on the subject, and that little was rather against the propriety of annoying a man, in their brother's condition, with business of so perplexing a nature. The fact that these important personages set their faces against the scheme had due weight, and most of the relatives began to calculate the probable amount of their respective shares under the law of distribution, as it stood in that day. This excellent and surpassingly wise community of New York had not then reached the pass of exceeding liberality towards which it is now so rapidly tending. In that day, the debtor was not yet thought of, as the creditor's next heir, and that plausible and impracticable desire of a false philanthropy, which is termed the Homestead Exemption Law --impracticable as to anything like a just and equitable exemption of equal amount in all cases of indebtedness--was not yet dreamed of. New York was then a sound and healthful community; making its mistakes, doubtless, as men ever will err; but the control of things had not yet passed into the hands of sheer political empirics, whose ignorance and quackery were stimulated by the lowest passion for majorities. Among other things that were then respected, were wills; but it was not known to a single individual, among all those who thronged the dwelling of Deacon Pratt, that the dying man had ever mustered the self-command necessary to make such an instrument. He was free to act, but did not choose to avail himself of his freedom. Had he survived a few years, he would have found himself in the enjoyment of a liberty so sublimated, that he could not lease, or rent a farm, or collect a common debt, without coming under the harrow of the tiller of the political soil.

The season had advanced to the early part of April, and that is usually a soft and balmy month on the sea-shore, though liable to considerable and sudden changes of temperature. On the day to which we now desire to transfer the scene, the windows of the deacon's bed-room were open, and the soft south wind fanned his hollow and pallid cheek. Death was near, though the principle of life struggled hard with the King of Terrors. It was now that that bewildered and Pharasaical faith which had so long held this professor of religion in a bondage even more oppressive than open and announced sins, most felt the insufficiency of the creed in which he had rather been speculating than trusting all his life, to render the passing hour composed and secure. There had always been too much of self in Deacon Pratt's moral temperament, to render his belief as humble and devout as it should be. It availed him not a hair, now, that he was a deacon, or that he had made long prayers in the market-places, where men could see him, or that he had done so much, as he was wont to proclaim, for example's sake. All had not sufficed to cleanse his heart of worldly-mindedness, and he now groped about him, in the darkness of a faith obscured, for the true light that was to illumine his path to another world.

The doctor had ordered the room cleared of all, but two or three of the dying man's nearest relatives. Among these last, however, was the gentle and tender-hearted Mary, who loved to be near her uncle, in this his greatest need. She no longer thought of his covetousness, of his griping usury, of his living so much for self and so little for God. While hovering about the bed, a message reached her that Baiting Joe wished to see her, in the passage that led to the bed-room. She went to this old fisherman, and found him standing near a window that looked towards the east, and which consequently faced the waters of Gardiner's Bay.

"There she is, Miss Mary," said Joe, pointing out of the window, his whole face in a glow, between joy and whiskey. "It should be told to the deacon at once, that his last hours might be happier than some that he has passed lately. That's she--though, at first, I did not know her."

Mary saw a vessel standing in towards Oyster Pond, and her familiarity with objects of that nature was such, as to tell her at once that it was a schooner; but so completely had she given up the Sea Lion, that it did not occur to her that this could be the long-missing craft.

"At what are you pointing, Joe?" the wondering girl asked, with perfect innocence.

"At that craft--at the Sea Lion of Sterling, which has been so long set down as missing, but which has turned up, just as her owner is about to cast off from this 'arth, altogether."

Joe might have talked for an hour: he did chatter away for two or three minutes, with his head and half his body out of the window, uninterrupted by Mary, who sank into a chair, to prevent falling on the floor. At length the dear girl commanded herself, and spoke.

"You cannot possibly be certain, Joe," she said; "that schooner does not look, to me, like the Sea Lion."

"Nor to me, in some things, while in other some she does. Her upper works seem strangely out of shape, and there's precious little on 'em. But no other fore-taw-sail schooner ever comes in this-a-way, and I know of none likely to do it. Ay, by Jupiter, there goes the very blue peter I helped to make with my own hands, and it was agreed to set it, as the deacon's signal. There's no mistake, now!"