106 LOSS OF THE ROTHSAY CASTLE. 
there seems to have been hardly power sufficient to contend 
effectively against the sea. Still, however, there was not, ne- 
cessarily, any immediate or alarming danger. Progress con- 
tinued to be made — the tide exerting a favorable influence, 
both as to their furtherance on their course, and in bearing 
them up to windward. The moon, declining in the western 
horizon, revealed, with its departing beams, land on the star- 
board bow. It was Puffin Island — sufficiently defining in the 
dubious light, the entrance to the Beaumaris channel. A cry 
of joy from the anxious passengers on deck proclaimed 
throughout the vessel the cheering tidings. Hope and ani- 
mation now assumed the place of previous alarm and despon- 
dency — feelings which, contrasted with the calamities uncon- 
sciously approaching, rendered the then realized horrors in- 
creasingly appalling 
It is an observable and instructive fact, that many of the 
most distressful dispensations of Providence with which we 
are acquainted, have fallen upon the appointed victims in the 
hours of happy excitement, of elevated enjoyment, or of gid- 
dy, thoughtless revelry, — strikingly fulfilling our Lord's warn- 
ing declaration, that " in such an hour as ye think not, the Son 
of Man cometh !" Well would it be for every adventurer on 
the flowery path-way of pleasure, if this consciousness were 
ever influentially before him ; — it would save him not only 
from the vast calamity of appearing unprepared in the pre- 
sence of a holy and heart-searching God, but it would pre- 
serve him from participation in worldly pleasures, either in 
themselves ungodly, or improper, because untimely. Nor 
would the chastening of our innocent enjoyments be found to 
render them the less gratifjdng ; but, the rather, because, so 
chastened, the more solid and satisfying. 
Whilst, however, we would desire to graft a serious and 
profitable thought upon the particular circumstance before 
us; we mean not to discourage the pursuit of an elevated en- 
joyment among the majestic works of nature and art, or to 
imply that the momentary indulgence of joyful hope among 
the desponding passengers was either untimely or blameable. 
Their joy was natural ; but it proved a temporary gleam, 
which cast the subsequent events more deeply and intensely 
into terrific shade. For soon after this it was, just about the 
midnight hour, when the windward tide had ceased, and the 
violence of the sea had begun to subside, that a violent shock 
proclaimed — though at the moment imperfectly apprehended 
— ^the beginnings of sorrows. But shock succeeded shock, 
