There she goes, brimful of anger and jealousy.  Mercy on the poor man!

  “Jealous Wife.”

  The dreadful fish that hath deserved the name
  Of Death.

  SPENSER.

As the brig moved out of the harbour of Nassau, I moved out of bed; and as she set her royals and made sail, I put on my hat and walked out.  The officers of the regiment quartered there, kindly invited me to join their mess; and the colonel enhanced the value of the offer by assigning for me good apartments in the barracks.  I was instantly removed to cleanly and comfortable lodgings.  I soon regained my strength, and was able to sit at the table, where I found thirty-five young officers, living for the day, careless of the morrow; and, beyond that never bestowing a thought.  It is a singular fact, that where life is most precarious, men are most indifferent about its preservation; and, where death is constantly before our eyes, as in this country, eternity is seldom in our thoughts:  but so it is; and the rule extends still further in despotic countries.  Where the union between the head and shoulders may be dissolved in a moment by the sword of a tyrant, life is not so valued, and death loses its terrors; hence the apathy and indifference with which men view their executioners in that state of society.  It seems as if existence, like estates, was valuable in proportion to the validity of the title-deeds by which they are held.

To digress no more.  Although I was far from being even commonly virtuous, which is about tantamount to absolute wickedness, I was no longer the thoughtless mortal I had ever been since I left school.  The society of Emily, and her image graven on my heart; the close confinement to the brig, and the narrow escape from death in the second attempt to save the poor sailor’s life, had altogether contributed their share to a kind of temporary reformation, if not to a disgust to the coarser descriptions of vice.  The lecture I had received from Emily on deceit, and the detestable conduct of my last captain, had, as I thought, almost completed my reformation.  Hitherto I felt I had acted wrong, without having the power to act right.  I forgot that I had never made the experiment.  The declaration of Captain G.’s atheism was so far from converting me, that from that moment I thought more seriously than ever of religion.  So great was my contempt for his character, that I knew whatever he said must be wrong, and, like the Spartan drunken slave, he gave me the greatest horror of vice.

Such was my reasoning, and such my sentiments, previous to any relapse into sin or folly.  I knew its heinousness.  I transgressed and repented; habit was all-powerful in me; and the only firm support I could have looked to for assistance was, unfortunately, very superficially attended to.  Religion, for any good purposes, was scarcely in my thoughts.  My system was a sort of Socratic heathen philosophy—­a moral code, calculated to take a man tolerably safe through a quiet world, but not to extricate him from a labyrinth of long-practised iniquity.