for which purpose God has doubtless endowed them with those soft, mild
tones, whose melodies cause our most cherished resolutions to vanish
in the air; like those massive stone gates we have seen in some of the
old castles in Germany, that resist the most powerful effort to push
them open, but which a spring of the simplest construction causes to
move gently on their formidable hinges.

Willis was silent; but no openly-expressed submission could have been
more eloquent than this mute acquiescence.

In the meantime the tempest raged with increased fury, the winds
howled, and the water splashed; it appeared at each shock as if the
elements had reached the utmost limit of the terrific; that the sea,
as the poet says, had lashed itself into exhaustion! But, anon, there
came another outburst more terrible still, to declare that, in his
anger as in his blessings, the All-Powerful has no other limit than
the infinite.

"If it is not in the power of human beings to aid the crew of the
_Nelson_," said Mrs. Becker kneeling, "there are other means more
efficacious which we are guilty in not having sought before."

Every one followed this example, and it was a touching scene to behold
the rough sailor yield submissively to the gentle violence of the
child's hand, and bend his bronzed and swarthy visage humbly beside
her cherub head.