Note 7 — Chapter IX

Just then, it seemed that every one on the ship "cared": That drunken, card-playing priest proposed to say "mass for the poor boy's soul"; but Captain Myles said: "None of your foolishness here". I could not escape the thought that he would have "read mass", if it had been in the Prayer-book, whether foolishness or not; for the ship's Captain is ordained to read the church service, or to appoint some one to read it. That desire to do something, springing from a feeling of helplessness and grief seems natural to mortals and cries out most pitilessly when faith is absent. I doubt not it was as sincere as any prayer ever uttered when Luther wanted to "say mass for the soul" of his mother. I had seen the poor boy cuffed about deck, driven to his hard task, beaten with a broom, and had remonstrated in vain. Between the priest with his rollicking ditties, gambling and drunkenness and the boy there was a great gulf fixed on that ship. "No association with second-class passengers" was the edict; and was not the priest first-class? and the boy, what was he? He had hidden himself among the boxes in the ship's hold at Liverpool to be taken any where, perhaps, out of the world, and so it was. That boy, that scene, what led to it and what followed, Mrs. Carr never forgot—"A neglected one, a prodigal, it may have been, but still a human; he needed something other than sacerdotal robes to show him that you are the servants of the Most High." Yes, she "cared" and so do I, even to this day.

O. A. C.