When I recovered my consciousness, I found myself plainly but comfortably dressed in the ordinary costume, except the hat, which lay beside me, of a dean in the Church of England.  My wounds had been carefully attended to, William Bludger had been taken on board, and I was surrounded by the kind faces of my benefactors, including the bishop’s consort.  My apologies for my somewhat sudden and unceremonious intrusion were cut short by the arrival of tea and a slight collation suitable for an invalid.  In an hour I was walking the quarter-deck with the bishop in command of the William Wilberforce, armed steam yacht, of North Shields, fitted out for the purposes of the Salvation Navy.  From the worthy prelate in command of the William Wilberforce, I learned much concerning his own past career and the nature of his enterprise, as I directed the navigation of the vessel through the shoals and reefs which lay about the harbour of the island.

The bishop (a purely brevet title) would refresh his memory, now and then, from a penny biography of himself with which he was provided, and the following, in brief, is a record of his life and adventures:—­

Thomas Sloggins (that was his name), from his earliest infancy, had been possessed with a passion for doing good to others, a passion, alas! but too rarely reciprocated.  I pass over many affecting details of his adventures as a ministering child:  how he endeavoured to win his father from tobacco by breaking his favourite pipes; how he strove to wean his elder brother from cruel field-sports, by stuffing the joints of his fishing-rod with gravel; with many other touching incidents.

Being almost entirely uneducated, young Sloggins, when he reached man’s estate, conceived that he would most benefit his fellow-creatures by combining the professions of the pulpit and the press—­by preaching on Sundays and at odd times, while he acted as outdoor reporter to The Rowdy Puritan on every lawful day.  Being a man of great earnestness and enterprise, he soon rose in the ranks of the Salvation Navy; and at one time commanded an evangelical barge on the benighted canals of our country.  Finally, he made England almost too hot to hold him, by the original forms of his benevolence, while, at the same time, he acquired the utmost esteem and confidence of many wealthy philanthropists and excellent, if impulsive, ladies.  These good people provided him with that well-equipped and armed steam yacht, the William Wilberforce, which he manned with a crew of converted characters (they certainly looked as if they must have needed a great deal of converting), and he had now for months been cruising in the South Pacific.  A local cyclone had driven the William Wilberforce out of her reckoning, and hence the appearance of that vessel in the very nick of time to achieve my rescue.