These wretched pirates were hateful and hating. Satiated with vice, they knew not where to turn for a single joy. Their shouts of laughter fell discordantly upon the ear like the revelry of demons. Satan never allows his votaries any happiness either in this world or in that which is to come. Wisdom’s ways only are ways of pleasantness, and her paths alone are those of peace. How far Captain Kidd entered into these godless carousals is not known. But it is not probable that he was then able to throw off all restraint, and become hail-fellow with these vulgar, degraded, profane wretches, whom in heart he must have despised. Neither is it probable that one accustomed to the society in which an honored New-York merchant would move, could so soon have formed a taste for the drunken revelry of the lowest and vilest creatures on earth. It is evident that these men had occasionally reproaches of conscience, and some faint sense of their terrible responsibility at God’s bar. Four of them decided one day to make a little artificial hell for themselves, that they might see who could stand its pains the longest. A cloudless tropical sun blistered the deck with its blazing rays. The cabin was heated like an oven. In addition to this, they built a fire in the stove, till the iron plates were red hot. They then with blaspheming oaths entered this furnace, and sprinkled brimstone upon the fire till the room was filled with its suffocating fumes. One of these wretches, apparently as fiend-like as a man could be, bore the pains of this little artificial hell for five minutes. None of the others could endure them so long. The victor came out very exultant. One would have thought that the idea would have occurred to their minds that there was some considerable difference between five minutes and eternity. We do not learn that any of these men were made better by the brief endurance of their self-inflicted tortures. The mind is appalled by the thought that these same men, when transferred to the spirit land, _may_ be as persistent in their hostility to all God’s laws as they were here. Captain Kidd found himself abandoned by nearly all his crew. He remained in port only long enough to recruit sufficient men to navigate his ship, and then, spreading the sails of his stolen vessel, the Quedagh Merchant, he set out for the West Indies, with his ill-gotten treasure of eighty thousand dollars. The news of Kidd’s piratic acts had been reported to the home government by the East India Company. Orders had accordingly been issued to all the governors of the American colonies to arrest him wherever he should appear.