"Then you are yet a stranger," he rejoined, "to the greatest happiness of which our nature is capable. I have enjoyed more heartfelt pleasure in the company of the young woman I have just left, than from every other source that has been opened to me from my childhood till now. Love, my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law." "Mary Campbell, did you not call her?" I said. "She is, I think, the loveliest creature I have ever seen; and I am much mistaken in the expression of her beauty, if her mind be not as lovely as her person." "It is, it is," he exclaimed--"the intelligence of an angel with the simplicity of a child. Oh, the delight of being thoroughly trusted, thoroughly beloved by one of the loveliest, best, purest-minded of all God's good creatures! To feel that heart beating against my own, and to know that it beats for me only! Never have I passed an evening with my Mary without returning to the world a better, gentler, wiser man. Love, my friend, is the fulfilling of the whole law. What are we without it?--poor, vile, selfish animals; our very virtues themselves, so exclusively virtues on our own behalf as to be well nigh as hateful as our vices. Nothing so opens and improves the heart, nothing so widens the grasp of the affections, nothing half so effectually brings us out of our crust of self, as a happy, well-regulated love for a pure-minded, affectionate-hearted woman!" "There is another kind of love, of which we sailors see somewhat," I said, "which is not so easily associated with good." "Love!" he replied--"no, Mr. Lindsay, that is not the name. Kind associates with kind in all nature; and love--humanizing, heart-softening love--cannot be the companion of whatever is low, mean, worthless, degrading--the associate of ruthless dishonour, cunning, treachery, and violent death. Even independent of its amount of evil as a crime, or the evils still greater than itself which necessarily accompany it, there is nothing that so petrifies the feeling as illicit connection." "Do you seriously think so?" I asked.