As the good man, with a swelling heart and sad eyes, in which glittered the sacred drops of human feeling, uttered these words, he looked like a pitying angel from whose lips reproach could not fall, and whose blessed office was only to instruct and to forgive.

The death of one as important as the Assistant Spikeman could not but be sensibly felt in so small a community.  He had been a man whose daring nature would not allow him to be at rest, and who was never contented, except in the exercise of all his faculties.  Hence he had been not only active and scheming in private life, but also busy and bold in public, driven forward, as it were, by a sort of inborn necessity.  Though not deeply regretted, he yet was missed.  Those whom his adventurous spirit employed in the fisheries, and the just-commencing fur trade, missed him; his brethren of the congregation, wherein his voice, to the edification of his hearers, had often been lifted up in the “gift of prophecying,” missed him; and his coadjutors in the government, to whom in more than one instance his keen natural sagacity had been a guide, and his zeal a stimulus and support, missed him; but it was only for a short time.  How often has it been remarked, that few things are as capable of making us feel our insignificance, as the shortness of time in which we are forgotten.  Active, prominent, influential as he had been, Spikeman was soon remembered only as yesterday is remembered.  There were no loves twining around his memory, reaching beyond the grave, and bringing him back to earth; no tender recollections of benefits conferred, which the heart cherishes as an inestimable treasure.  There was naught for the mind to dwell upon, save his public duties, which he, had indeed discharged respectably, but no more.  Another Assistant could fill his place as well; another exercise the gift of prophecying to the use of edifying; and other merchants succeed to, his trade.  Verily is the life of man as the track of an arrow in the air; as smoke lost in the clouds; as a flake of snow that falls upon the water; as a childish grief, or aught else that is most transient.

But the death of the wicked is a benefit to earth.  A gloomy shadow hath passed away; the blight of its presence will fall no more on the innocent.  The purpose for which he was sent into this world, that from its joys and its sorrows he might become a nobler being, seems to have been defeated.  But I know not.  Pass, then, dark spirit; my eyes seek not to follow thy track.

The relation which existed between Arundel and Eveline was, of course, affected by the disclosure of Spikeman on his death-bed—­no opposition being henceforth made to the free intercourse of the two young people.  There were, indeed, some who lamented that the daughter of precious Edmund Dunning should become the wife of one who had not cast in his lot with the saints; but then, again, Arundel was no enemy to their cause, no railing Rabsheka, but a well-behaved and modest