10 
SCENES IN THE PACIFIC. 
tains, the heart was pressed with sadness: we drank in 
silence and with swimming eyes. 
A pleasant conversation followed this toast, in which 
each one of our little band exhibited himself in his own 
way. The Captain was a hearty old Saxon, who had in¬ 
herited from a thousand generations, a love for home, its 
hearth and blazing evening fire, its old oaken table, its fami¬ 
ly arm-chair, and the wife who presided over that temple of 
holy affections. In him, therefore, we had the genuine 
spirit of those good old times when man used his physical and 
mental powers, to build about his heart the structures of posi¬ 
tive happiness, instead of the artificial semblances of these, 
which fashion and affectation draw around the modern home. 
Our professor of psalmody was the opposite of this. He 
had, when the red blood of youth warmed his heart, in the 
ways of honest nature, spoken sweet things to a lovely girl, 
won her affections, promised marriage, and as his beard grew 
became a gentleman ; that is, jilted her. He, therefore, was 
fond of freedom, could not be confined to so plain and quiet a 
business as the love of one woman, and the care of a family 
of children. u It was quite horrid, indeed it was, for a man 
who had any music in his soul ; the mere idea was concen¬ 
trated picra to his moral stomach ; the thought, bah ! that a 
gentleman could ever think of being a daddy, and trotting on 
his paternal knee a semi-yearling baby.” 
Mr. Simpson was from the braes of Scotland. For many 
years he had lived an isolated and roving life, among the 
nows, morasses, and lakes of the wilderness, which lies west 
and north-west of Hudson’s Bay. He had been taught his 
catechism at kirk, and also a proper respect for the ties of the 
domestic sentiments. But the peculiar idea of manliness 
which grows up in those winter realms of danger, privation, 
and loneliness, had gradually habituated him to speak of 
these relations as desirable mainly when the body had ex¬ 
pended its energy in striding mountains, in descending rocky 
