Captain Durbin consented, and when he came down again at midnight from the deck, the children had both fallen asleep, but their hands were clasped in each other's, and the flushed cheeks and dewy lashes of both showed that they had been weeping. The next morning Captain Durbin heard the story of the orphan boy. Emily Durbin stood beside him while he told it, and he needed the courage which her presence gave him, for his cowed spirit could not yet rise to confidence in man. The mingled indignation and pity with which Captain Durbin heard the simple but touching narrative of his life—the earnest kindness with which, at the conclusion, he drew him to his side, and told him that he would be his father, and Emily his sister, adding, "God gave you to me, and as His gift I will love you and care for you," first taught him that his friend Emily was not the one only angel of mercy in our world. As time passed on, and Captain Durbin kept well the promise of those words, instructing him with care and guarding him with tenderness as well as with fidelity, his faith became firm, not only in his fellow-men, but in Him who had brought such great good for him out of the darkest evil. His long repressed affections sprang into vigorous growth, his intellect expanded rapidly in their glow, his eye grew bright, his step elastic, and his whole air redolent of a joy which none but those who have suffered as he had done can conceive. In the handsome youth who returned two years afterwards with Captain Durbin to Boston, and who walked so proudly at his side, leading Emily by the hand, few could have recognized the wild boy of that western Island.
Such was the transformation which the spirit of love, breathing itself through the lips of a little child, had effected. "Verily, of such" children "is the kingdom of heaven."
[CHAPTER VI.]
The entertainment of the evening gave its character to our conversation on the following morning. It was a conversation too grave for introduction into a work intended only to aid in the entertainment of festive hours: it commenced with the English "poor-laws," and ended with a discussion of the tenure of property in that land, and the wisdom of our own republican fathers in abolishing entails—a subject affording a fair opportunity to us Americans, to indulge a little in that self-glorification which we are accused of loving so well.
"What a curious book would a 'History of Entails' be!" exclaimed Mr. Arlington, "how full of the romance of life!"
"Romance!" ejaculated Annie.
"Yes, romance; for under this system, the poor man, whose life seemed doomed to one unbroken struggle with fortune, for the necessaries of existence, finds himself, by some unexpected casualty, the possessor of rank, and of what seems to him boundless wealth."
"Ah, yes!" said I, "but you have given us only the bright side of the picture. To make room for this stranger, whose only connection with the house of which he has so unexpectedly become the head is probably that preserved in genealogical tables, the daughters of the house, or their children it may be, reared in luxury, must go forth to a life of comparative privation. I met, some years ago, in one of my visits to the Far West, a young Englishman, who—but I will read you the story of his life, as I wrote it out soon after parting with him."
"Have you a picture of him, Aunt Nancy?" asked Robert Dudley.