While Harry was absent and thus employed, Rose wept much and prayed more.  She would have felt herself almost alone in the world, but for the youth to whom she had so recently, less than a week before, plighted her faith in wedlock.  That new tie, it is true, was of sufficient importance to counteract many of the ordinary feelings of her situation; and she now turned to it as the one which absorbed most of the future duties of her life.  Still she missed the kindness, the solicitude, even the weaknesses of her aunt; and the terrible manner in which Mrs. Budd had perished, made her shudder with horror whenever she thought of it.  Poor Biddy, too, came in for her share of the regrets.  This faithful creature, who had been in the relict’s service ever since Rose’s infancy, had become endeared to her, in spite of her uncouth manners and confused ideas, by the warmth of her heart, and the singular truth of her feelings.  Biddy, of all her family, had come to America, leaving behind her not only brothers and sisters, but parents living.  Each year did she remit to the last a moiety of her earnings, and many a half-dollar that had come from Rose’s pretty little hand, had been converted into gold, and forwarded on the same pious errand to the green island of her nativity.  Ireland, unhappy country! at this moment what are not the dire necessities of thy poor!  Here, from the midst of abundance, in a land that God has blessed in its productions far beyond the limits of human wants, a land in which famine was never known, do we at this moment hear thy groans, and listen to tales of suffering that to us seem almost incredible.  In the midst of these chilling narratives, our eyes fall on an appeal to the English nation, that appears in what it is the fashion of some to term the first journal of Europe (!) in behalf of thy suffering people.  A worthy appeal to the charity of England seldom fails; but it seems to us that one sentiment of this might have been altered, if not spared.  The English are asked to be “forgetful of the past,” and to come forward to the relief of their suffering fellow-subjects.  We should have written “mindful of the past,” in its stead.  We say this in charity, as well as in truth.  We come of English blood, and if we claim to share in all the ancient renown of that warlike and enlightened people, we are equally bound to share in the reproaches that original misgovernment has inflicted on thee.  In this latter sense, then, thou hast a right to our sympathies, and they are not withheld.

As has been already said, we now advance the time eight-and-forty hours, and again transfer the scene to that room in the hospital which was occupied by Spike.  The approaches of death, during the interval just named, had been slow but certain.  The surgeons had announced that the wounded man could not possibly survive the coming night; and he himself had been made sensible that his end was near.  It is scarcely necessary to add that Stephen Spike, conscious of his vigour and strength, in command of his brig, and bent on the pursuits of worldly gains, or of personal gratification, was a very different person from him who now lay stretched on his pallet in the hospital of Key West, a dying man.  By the side of his bed still sat his strange nurse, less peculiar in appearance, however, than when last seen by the reader.