For myself, I was not as unhappy as I should have been if I had not been so busy. The only really well person of the party, I had enough to do in waiting on the sick. I had made friends with the cook, a great good-natured blackamoor, by speaking to him in English, when I found that he understood that language, and I cooked our miserable provisions so as to make them as savory as possible, and now and then secured a bit of something better than usual to tempt the appetite of poor Sister Margaret, who seemed likely enough to die of exhaustion. Going about as I did, I was often free to take out my little book and study its contents. The more I did so, the more I recalled what I had learned of the other Scriptures, the more I wondered how I could ever have so far departed from the simplicity of the Gospel as to profess the Roman Catholic religion. I never should have done so but for the fact that my belief in all religion had been weakened by intercourse with unbelievers, and my heart corrupted by love of pleasure and of the world. I do not say by any means that this is true of all perverts, but I know it was true of me. But now arose a grave question, which indeed had troubled me before. I felt that I must confess my faith before men; I could not go on serving God according to the faith of my fathers and worshipping the saints at the same time. I could not believe in and apply to the One Mediator, amid at the same time invoke a hundred others. It may be easy for any one who reads these lines, and who has never been in any danger, to say what my conduct should have been. But for me, in the midst of the conflict, it was not so easy. I well knew what would be my fate, for the Jesuits ruled in Canada, and that with a rod of iron, and I had seen enough of Mother Mary to guess well that she would have no compassion for a heretic. I thought and prayed and wept, and at last strength seemed to come to me. I had nothing to do just now but to wait on my companions. When the time came for help, I should have help. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. Help did come, and, as so often happens, through trouble. We had been out five weeks when we were overtaken by a tempest, compared to which all we had suffered before was as a summer breeze. I do not know enough of nautical matters to describe it. I know that for many days neither sun nor stars appeared; that we were tossed up to the skies and then hurled down to the abyss; that we lost sail and masts and were more than once in imminent danger of sinking; and that when the storm subsided at last we drifted in helpless wreck, having lost all our boats, and having our ship so injured that the least increase in the storm might send her to the bottom.