A long and gloomy silence followed, during which Raoul turned his face aft, and stood looking at the movements of the men as they washed the decks, while Ithuel seated himself on a knight-head, and his chin resting on his hand, he sat ruminating, in bitterness of spirit, like Milton’s devil, in some of his dire cogitations, on the atrocious wrong of which he had really been the subject.  Bodies of men are proverbially heartless.  They commit injustice without reflection, and vindicate their abuses without remorse.  And yet it may be doubtful if either a nation or an individual ever tolerated or was an accessory in a wrong, that the act, sooner or later, did not recoil on the offending party, through that mysterious principle of right which is implanted in the nature of things, bringing forth its own results as the seed produces its grain, and the tree its fruits; a supervision of holiness that it is usual to term (and rightly enough, when we remember who created principles) the providence of God.  Let that people dread the future, who, in their collective capacity, systematically encourage injustice of any sort; since their own eventual demoralization will follow as a necessary consequence, even though they escape punishment in a more direct form.

We shall not stop to relate the moody musings of the New Hampshire man.  Unnurtured, and, in many respects, unprincipled as he was, he had his clear conceptions of the injustice of which he had been one among thousands of other victims; and, at that moment, he would have held life itself as a cheap sacrifice, could he have had his fill of revenge.  Time and again, while a captive on board the English ship in which he had been immured for years, had he meditated the desperate expedient of blowing up the vessel; and had not the means been wanting, mercenary and selfish as he ordinarily seemed, he was every way equal to executing so dire a scheme, in order to put an end to the lives of those who were the agents in wronging him, and his own sufferings, together.  The subject never recurred to his mind without momentarily changing the current of its thoughts, and tinging all his feelings with an intensity of bitterness that it was painful to bear.  At length, sighing heavily, he rose from the knight-head, and turned toward the mouth of the bay, as if to conceal from Raoul the expression of his countenance.  This act, however, was scarcely done, ere he started, and an exclamation escaped him that induced his companion to turn quickly on his heel and face the sea.  There, indeed, the growing light enabled both to discover an object that could scarcely be other than one of interest to men in their situation.