Many hands were stretched out, but Harry thrust all others aside, and, receiving the light form of the child in his strong arms, bore her off to his father’s cottage, leaving his comrades to attend to the wants of the others.
“Oh Harry!” exclaimed Mrs Boyns, when her son burst into the house, “is your father safe?”
“Ay, safe and well,” he cried. “Look sharp, mother—get hot blankets and things ready, for here’s a little girl almost dead with cold. She has just been rescued from a wreck—saved by the new lifeboat!”
Chapter Two.
Describes a merchant and his god, and concludes with “a message from the sea.”
A close-fisted, hard-hearted, narrow-minded, poor-spirited man was John Webster, Esquire, merchant and shipowner, of Ingot Lane, Liverpool. And yet he was not altogether without good points. Indeed, it might be said of him that if he had been reared under more favourable circumstances he might have been an ornament to society and a blessing to his country, for he was intelligent and sociable, and susceptible to some extent of tender influences, when the indulging of amiable feelings did not interfere with his private interests. In youth he had even gone the length of holding some good principles, and was known to have done one or two noble things—but all this had passed away, for as he grew older the hopeful springs were dried up, one by one, by an all-absorbing passion—the love of money—which ultimately made him what he was, a disgrace to the class to which he belonged, and literally (though not, it would seem, in the eye of law) a wholesale murderer!
At first he began by holding, and frequently stating, the opinion that the possession of much money was a most desirable thing; which undoubtedly was—and is, and will be as long as the world lasts—perfectly true, if the possession be accompanied with God’s blessing. But Mr Webster did not even pretend to look at the thing in that light. He scorned to make use of the worldly man’s “Oh, of course, of course,” when that idea was sometimes suggested to him by Christian friends. On the contrary, he boldly and coldly asserted his belief that “God, if there was a God at all, did not interfere in such matters, and that for his part he would be quite satisfied to let anybody else who wanted it have the blessing if he only got the money.” And so it pleased God to give John Webster much money without a blessing.
The immediate result was that he fell in love with it, and, following the natural laws attached to that vehement passion, he hugged it to his bosom, became blind to everything else, and gave himself entirely up to it with a self-denying devotion that robbed him of much of his natural rest, of nearly all his graces, and most of his happiness—leaving him with no hope in this world, save that of increasing his stores of money, and with no hope for the world to come at all.