"This man," continued Père Jerome, "became a smuggler and at last a
pirate in the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, lay not that sin to his charge
alone! But a strange thing followed. Being in command of men of a sort
that to control required to be kept at the austerest distance, he now
found himself separated from the human world and thrown into the solemn
companionship with the sea, with the air, with the storm, the calm the
heavens by day, the heavens by night. My friends, that was the first
time in his life that he ever found himself in really good company.

"Now, this man had a great aptness for accounts. He had kept them--had
rendered them. There was beauty, to him, in a correct, balanced, and
closed account. An account unsatisfied was a deformity. The result is
plain. That man, looking out night after night upon the grand and holy
spectacle of the starry deep above and the watery deep below, was sure
to find himself, sooner or later, mastered by the conviction that the
great Author of this majestic creation keeps account of it; and one
night there came to him, like a spirit walking on the sea, the awful,
silent question: 'My account with God--how does it stand?' Ah! friends,
that is a question which the book of nature does not answer.

"Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes. But, after it answers
the first question with 'God,' nothing but questions follow; and so, one
day, this man gave a ship full of merchandise for one little book which
answered those questions. God help him to understand it! and God help
you, monsieur, and you, madame, sitting here in your _smuggled clothes_,
to beat upon the breast with me and cry, 'I, too, Lord--I, too, stood by
and consented.'"

Père Jerome had not intended these for his closing words; but just
there, straight away before his sight and almost at the farthest door, a