The Crater; or, Vulcan’s Peak A Tale of the Pacific

expiated by the ruthless march of the conqueror. Yet the rul­ing men of both these communities affect a great sensibility when the long-slumbering young lion of the West rouses him­self in his lair, after twenty years of forbearance, and stretches out a paw in resentment for outrages that no other nation, conscious of his strength, would have endured for as many months, because, forsooth, he is the young lion of the West. Never mind: by the time New Zealand and Tahiti are brought under the yoke, the Californians may be admitted to an equal participation in the rights of American citizens.

brought us in collision, legally, with an editor; and we obtained a verdict against him. Dissatisfi ed with defeat, as is apt to be the case, he applied for a new trial. Such an application was to be sustained by affi davits, and he made his own, as usual. Now, in this affi davit, our competitor swore distinctly and unequivocally, to certain al­leged facts (we think to the number of six), every one of which was untrue. Fortunately for the party implicated, the matter sworn to was purely ad captandum stuff, and, in a legal sense, not pertinent to the issue. This prevented it from being perjury in law. Still, it was all untrue, and nothing was easier than to show it. Now, we do not doubt that the person thus swearing believed all that he swore to, or he would not have had the extreme folly to expose himself as he did; but he was so much in the habit of publishing gossip in his journal, that, when an occasion arrived, he did not hesitate about swearing to what he had read in other journals, without taking the trouble to inquire if it were true! One of these days we may lay all this, along with much other similar proof of the virtue there is in gossip, so plainly before the world, that he who runs may read.

used, Mark said had been appropriated to his wants, without going into details, and the main results being so very satisfac­tory, the insurers asked no further.

mon, and in which nothing was to be done but that which was right. Mark had not the least objection in the world to the last proposition, and would have been glad enough to see it carried out to the letter, though he differed essentially with the applicants, as to the mode of achieving so desirable an end. He was of opinion that civilization could not exist without property, or property without a direct personal in­terest in both its accumulation and its preservation. They, on the other hand, were carried away by the crotchet that com­munity-labour was better than individual labour, and that a hundred men would be happier and better off with their individualities compressed into one, than by leaving them in a hundred subdivisions, as they had been placed by nature. The theorists might have been right, had it been in their power to compress a hundred individuals into one, but it was riot. After all their efforts, they would still remain a hundred individuals, merely banded together under more restraints, and with less liberty than are common.

ther and his father-in-law, and thought it better to die under one theory than under two. As regards a clergyman, Mark had greater diffi culty. The question of sect was not as seriously de­bated half a century ago as it is to-day; still it was debated. Bris­tol had a very ancient society, of the persuasion of the Angli­can church, and Mark’s family belonged to it. Bridget, however, was a Presbyterian, and no small portion of the new colonists were what is called Wet-Quakers; that is, Friends who are not very particular in their opinions or observances. Now, religion often caused more feuds than anything else: still it was impos­sible to have a priest for every persuasion, and one ought to suffi ce for the whole colony. The question was of what sect should that one clergyman be? So many prejudices were to be consulted, that the governor was about to abandon the proj­ect in despair, when accident determined the point. Among Heaton’s relatives was a young man of the name of Hornblow­er, no bad appellation, by the way, for one who had to sound so many notes of warning, who had received priest’s orders from the hands of the well-known Dr. White, so long the presid­ing Bishop of America, and whose constitution imperiously demanded a milder climate than that in which he then lived. As respects him, it became a question purely of humanity, the divine being too poor to travel on his own account, and he was received on board the Rancocus, with his wife, his sis­ter, and two children, that he might have the benefi t of living within the tropics. The matter was fully explained to the oth­er emigrants, who could not raise objections if they would, but who really were not disposed to do so in a case of such obvious motives. A good portion of them, probably, came to

the conclusion that Episcopalian ministrations were better than none, though, to own the truth, the liturgy gave a good deal of scandal to a certain portion of their number. Reading prayers was so profane a thing, that these individuals could scarcely consent to be present at such a vain ceremony; nor was the discontent, on this preliminary point, fully disposed of until the governor once asked the principal objector how he got along with the Lord’s Prayer, which was not only written and printed, but which usually was committed to memory! Notwithstanding this diffi culty, the emigrants did get along with it without many qualms, and most of them dropped qui­etly into the habit of worshipping agreeably to a liturgy, just as if it were not the terrible profanity that some of them had imagined. In this way, many of our most intense prejudices get lost in new communications.