I could make no answer. Her pure spirit overcame me. I could only ask her to forgive me. She bade me kneel down upon the deck just as we used to kneel when we were children. Ruth prayed that I might come into a better spirit. I was in much need of her gentleness, and with great diligence she set to work to curb my resentment against the Catholics, which ten long years of disappointment and continual warfare had tempered to the hardness of steel. Every morning upon the deck as we sped across the wide ocean she wrought against my contrary spirit till it was partly broken. My little Ruth, whom I had protected so zealously in her childhood, wound me around her finger and ruled me firmly, but with all the gentleness of love. “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” Her words and the promises she talked about in the good Book were like music, and I was beginning to be a better man. “Did we not prophesy in thy name, and by thy name cast out devils?” She showed me what all this meant, and that if I went on in the way I had begun I should some day be face to face with the great denial: “And then shall I profess unto them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” Such was the burden of her teaching. She spoke much of the golden rule, and by that text she brought me to see how my fierce zeal against the Roman church was but persecution under cover of my own selfish faith as the Catholics persecuted under theirs. I remember one afternoon in particular when we were more than half way across the Atlantic. We were nestling in the bow of the ship beneath a flapping sail, and Ruth sat by my side, and teaching me, just as Jesus may have taught his disciples not to forget what He was telling them. The sun beat down warm and comfortable upon the deck. The merry surface of the water laughed in skipping sunlight. She had talked to me a long time that afternoon, and as she talked a great peace came upon me and little by little the remorse for my evil ways slipped away and vanished at her forgiving words.