The ministration of women was one of the delightful things connected with the event. A betrothed had no sooner heard of the wreck and of the survival of her lover, than she hastened to his side and spent the days in caring for him and comforting him by her presence. When the clergymen visited those different persons at their hotels, they were most respectful in their cordial response to prayer and words of counsel. Even those to whom the subject had not altogether been agreeable before, listened and seemed stirred to the heart with grateful emotions. The time and place for prayer was given, and such nearness to the Almighty God was never known before. It seemed as if the veil of eternity had opened, and the presence of God was felt. A loving wife, so gentle and so good, had come to her husband’s side. The affection and the care were great, but the gratitude to God was more, and the piety of both became suddenly deep. It was like the stream in the prophet’s vision. As the past of Christian life was reviewed so seriously, penitence sprang up within the heart, and then the gratitude to God, and then the consecration, and then the delightful swelling love and peace, and then the faith that seemed to hide itself in God’s own heart, and there was a mingling of the emotions as if the ocean of God’s presence was receiving them to its own deep love, and they were taking the first baptism of the Spirit. The goodness of that precious wife, now had its triumph. It brought the husband’s heart and soul to the same deep faith and piety which she had possessed. A gentleman, too, who had never made a profession of religion, but whose conversation showed much of acquaintance with the world, and habits of observation, was led to unburden his heart’s inmost thoughts to the clergymen who called in. He said: “I am not a professor of religion, sir. I am a worldly man--a man of business--but I have been brought up religiously, have had a praying father and mother, and it seems to me as if I had some faith, for as I was going down in that wreck, and felt that indescribable sensation of falling--(and here he dropped his hands beside the bed with such expressive look and gesture)--a passage of Scripture flashed into my mind, and has been running in it ever since. These are the words: “The foundation of the Lord standeth sure.” The clergyman turned to the Bible, and found the text, and was impressed with the wonderful appropriateness of it: “The Foundation of the Lord standeth sure and the Lord knoweth them that are his.” [Illustration] CHAPTER XXI. THE MEMORIAL SERVICES. The time at length arrived for laying away the unburied dead. Nobody had recognized them. God alone knew them, and therefore to his sacred earth were they consigned, that at the resurrection day he might bring them forth to the knowledge of all. Garnered in the harvest of flame, they were to be laid away in God’s store-house.