Her husband, not to be a whit behind her, took his ship home again, sailed to the island of New Zealand, and in Mungunui married an English girl, twenty years his junior. He then engaged in the English whaling-service, wherein he accumulated considerable money, and after the lapse of a few years returned to the States, taking his wife and their two children with him. At home, he for some years rested; but the continual yearning for the sea experienced by all who have once been afloat, and not been disgusted with life thereon, induced him, in his old age, to ship as cooper of the Mary. No sooner was he afloat, however, than on exerting himself he found that his was not now a system such as that which had carried him through so many years of hardship and exposure. Fast living and imprudence had done their work, and his constitution was gone. The bracing sea-air, instead of invigorating, depressed and weakened him. Dispirited, he was at last laid up, like a worn-out hulk, without power or will to be engaged in aught but the most puerile employments. During his stay aboard the Mary (rather over two years) he had not heard from home; and, being very ingenious, he had, to occupy his mind and drive away heart-sickness, employed himself by scrimschawing, and had completed a store of unique and carefully-fabricated articles of various descriptions, from woods he procured in the different ports he had visited, or from ivory and bone. The boat being now ready to return, I left the narrator, and went aboard our own ship. I informed the captain that he must send him into the nearest port, (St. Helena,) where he might procure rest and good medical treatment. This he thought inexpedient; but, by dint of pressing, I convinced him of the absolute necessity of such a course. After carrying my point, I had the curiosity to ask him about the cooper’s antecedents; because I had not given full credence to all his story, inasmuch as old sailors are so famous for drawing a long bow. The captain gave me a rehearsal of his past life, which fully substantiated all that he had said of himself; and, after he had finished it, I left him, with the conviction that I had seen the most practical illustration possible of a career at sea, where Christianity or morality had not held the helm. Here was a man, who had made much more than a competency during life, and who had walked his own quarter-deck, after having gained his position by his own unaided personal exertion, reduced at the end of a life-time of battling with the elements to a subordinate station--sick, debilitated, and uncared-for--aged, weak, and careworn--far away from home, without the fostering attentions of a wife or children to render the couch of sickness other than a bed of thorns; and this lamentable situation brought on, not by the villany or mismanagement of others, but, according to his own confession, by his individual imprudence.