But let us be pathetic—so get out your bandana, and prepare to blow your nose most touchingly.
Since the last of the events recorded in the preceding pages occurred, many a long year has slid away.
The hair that was then dark and clustering, has become thin and grizzled—although, what is it to you, whether I am bald or wigged? The arm that was strongly knit and vigorous, is now weak and trembling—for which you don't care one farthing. The spirits, then so light and elastic that they danced half in air, in the merry breeze and jocund sunshine, over every happy undulation of the clear smooth swell of early life, are now dead and water-logged, like a swamped buoy that has been staved by the rough weather we all must look to meet with;—never to float again. My Nelly was then Miss Helen Hudson, a happy laughing girl; she is now a little sharp-visaged anxious matron; her daughters growing up around her, and budding into womanhood, and her boys (for she has brought me a whole bushelful of small Brails), glorying in the exuberance of glee incidental to the spring of life, like so many young what-do-ye-call ums; for I am in a hurry to get done—and have no handy simile for the nonce. "Master Brail! Master Brail! you had better copy the parish register at once." Patience, my dear boy—Patience, we shall not long cross each other, for we are now about bearing up finally on our separate courses.
Many of the friends I have lived amongst and loved, and whose heartstrings were in turn wound around me, have dropped, one by one, like seared leaves in autumn, into the narrow-house, whither we are all, at sea or on shore, fast journeying.
As for me Benjie, when bowling along with all the canvass I could spread (sometimes more than I could well carry), before the cheerful breeze of prosperity, a sudden gust has, more than once, blown my swelling expectations out of the boltropes into ribbons, proving, by sore experience, that here below it is not a trade-wind; and not sudden squalls only, severe for the moment, but soon over; my strained bark has often been tossed by rough and continuous gales, so that, more than once, I have hardly escaped foundering. Periods of sickness and languishing have not been wanting, wherein the exhausted spirit has faintly exclaimed in the morning, "Would God it were evening!" and at evening, "Would God it were morning!"
For many a weary day, and restless night, Death himself—and how much more appalling his aspect here, than when faced manfully in open day, with the pulses strong, and the animal spirits in brisk circulation, amidst a goodly fellowship of brave companions!—yea, Death himself hath shaken his uplifted dart over his prostrate victim from out the heart-depressing twilight of a sick-room; yet the hand of the grim feature was held, that he should not smite. And, oh! who can tell the misery and crushing disappointment of the soul, awaking to the consciousness of a dangerous illness, from feverish and troubled sleep—such sleep as the overworked mariner sinks into, his lullaby the howling of the storm, and roaring of the breakers, even when his vessel is on the rocks, with the tumbling seas raging in multitudinous ebb and flow amongst their black and slippery tangle-capped pinnacles, and the yeasty foam-flakes, belched from their flinty caverns, falling thickly on his drenched garments—sleep, wherein, most like, he meets the friends of his youth, who have long gone before him to their account, and wanders in imagination with them (all his recent sufferings and actual danger, for a brief but blessed moment, utterly forgotten) through the quiet valleys and happy scenes of his boyhood, never to be by him again revisited—sleep, from which he is only roused to all the horrors of his actual situation by the gritty rasping of the shattered hull as it is thundered down with every send of the sea on the sharp rocks, the groaning of the loosened timbers, the crashing and creaking of the falling masts, the lumbering and rasping and rattling of the wreck alongside, entangled by the rigging and loose ropes, that surges up in foaming splashes, as if chafing to break adrift, and the cries of his shipmates—and thus wrenched from Elysium, to find himself "even as a man wrecked upon a sand, that looks to be washed off next tide?" That can he; and although his riven vessel has for the moment been hove off the rocks, and rides clear of the reefs and broken water to leeward, it may be by the mere reverberation of the ground-swell,—yet he knows his only remaining cable is three parts chafed, and that, although he may hang on by the single strand for an anxious day or two, part it must at last.
However, it has pleased Heaven, even when the weather was at the worst and darkest, and the wind raging at the loudest, and the mountainous seas at the highest, to break away, and lance forth a beam of blessed sunshine, which, breaking on his soul, might comfort him.
But, in such a situation, when the breezing up of the first gale may be his last,—and no one can tell how long the gleam of fine weather will continue,—every man must regard his past life, if he thinks at all, as at the best but a feverish dream, and endeavour to prepare for the inevitable issue of his anxiety and dread with the calmness and self-possession of a reasonable and accountable being; keeping a bright look-out for the life-boat of our blessed Religion, which all, sooner or later, will be convinced affords the only sure means of escape, even although it be seen glancing at first but as the seamew's wing in the distance, amidst the obscurity of the horizon and dimness of the spray and mist; yet, if anxiously hailed, and earnestly watched, it will infallibly sheer alongside at last, when the fearful cry of "She parts, she parts!" gushes high above the turmoil of troubled thoughts within, and save all who have put their trust in it.
"And why this gloomy ending to a merry tale?"
Grudge it not, shipmate; but bear with me a brief moment still. We begun in jest—we have ended in earnest—fit type of human life. We have had a long cruise and many a good laugh together, and now we find leave-taking is not joyous. But call it not a gloomy ending: solemn it may be, and indeed has unwittingly become; but surely not unfitting, on that account, the close of a work that has been the chief solace of a long illness, and which, whenever it beguiles the tedium of a sick-couch to a suffering brother, shall, in attaining that end, have fully accomplished the desire of him who now bids all hands, kindly and respectfully,