And I would ask you to believe that I do not relate such circumstances as these from any ostentatious wish to parade my piety, of which God knows I have not so large a store that I need be vain of showing it; but that I may in some poor fashion justify many good men in my own profession who, because they are scandalised by persons among us that are bad, are confounded with these by people ashore who imagine the typical sailor to be a loose, debauched fellow, with his mouth full of bad language and his head full of drink. I say earnestly that this is not so; that a large and generous soul animates many sailors; that they love God, pray to Him, and in many ways too rough, maybe, to commend them to fastidious piety, but not surely the less honest for the roughness, strive to act up to a just standard of goodness; and that even among the bad--bad, I mean, through the looseness of their morals and the insanity of their language--there is often found a hidden instinctive religion and veneration and fear of God not to be discovered in the classes ashore to which you may parallel them. Nor, indeed, do I understand how this can fail to be; for no familiarity with the mighty deep can lessen its ever-appealing grandeur to them as a symbol of heavenly power and majesty; and the frequent fear of their lives in which sailors go--the fury of tempests, the darkness of stormy nights, the fragility of the ship in comparison with the mountainous waves which menace her, the horror of near and iron coasts--I say that such things, which are daily presented to them, must inevitably excite and sustain contemplations which very few events that happen on shore are calculated to arouse in the minds of the ignorant classes with whom such sailors as I am speaking of are on a level. When I quitted the cabin, supported by Mary, I found myself in a very spacious saloon, most handsomely furnished and decorated, and striking me the more by the contrast it offered to the plain and small interior of the _Grosvenor's_ cabin. The table was being prepared for lunch: smartly dressed stewards and under-stewards trotted to and fro; there were flowers on the table, vases of gold fish swinging from the deck, a rich thick carpet underfoot, comfortable and handsome sofas; a pianoforte stood against the mizzen-mast, which was covered with a mahogany skin and gilded; two rows of lamps went the length of the saloon; and what with the paintings on the cabin doors, the curtains, the rich brasswork about the spacious skylights, the bright sunshine streaming in upon the whole scene and kindling a brilliance in the polished woodwork, the crystal on the table, the looking-glasses at the fore end of the saloon--I fairly paused with amazement, scarcely conceiving it possible that this airy, sunshiny, sumptuous drawing-room was actually the interior of a ship, and that we were on the sea, steaming at the rate of so many miles an hour towards England.