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The aged fisherman, with his rugged face and hard hands, lay helplessly on his clean bed; but his eyes were still bright and his voice strong.

"Put a chair, Polly," he said to his daughter. "I take this kind, ma'am. Here I am, you see, a disabled old hulk. I've made a many voyages in my time, when I was in the king's service." Here a fit of coughing forced him to stop.

When he had ceased to cough, the visitor said, "Yes, you have passed a busy life, my friend; and what a mercy it is that God gives you a few days of quiet and leisure at the end of it, to think of the last voyage, -- the entrance, we may hope, into an eternal haven! Do you think of that last voyage? Do you pray to God to have mercy on you for Christ's sake, and grant you an entrance to that haven of rest?"

The old man assented reverently and heartily, and then said, "Mary, the lady has never a chair; I told you to set the chair for her. A good daughter she has always been to me, ma'am. Her poor mother died when I was in the Atalante, Captain Hickey; you've heard of him, ma'am? The discipline he maintained! He was the finest captain in the service."

"I never heard of him," replied the visitor.

"He lost his ship in a sea-fog off Halifax harbor. He had despatches aboard; and he made up his mind they should be delivered. He fired a fog-signal gun, in hopes it would be answered from the lighthouse on Cape Sambro; but by a sad mischance it happened that the Barossa, that was likewise lost in this fog, answered it; and the unfortunate Atalante was steered according to that gun. She struck; and in less than a quarter of an hour we was all out of her, every officer, man and boy, many on us not half clothed; and there wasn't a mast, nor a beam, not a bit of broken spar, to be seen of her. She filled and heeled over; and, almost afore we could cut the pinnace from the boom, she parted in two between the main and mizen masts, and the swell sucked her in, guns and stores and all."

"That must have been an awful scene," observed the visitor. "It is a great mercy that you were preserved in such a danger. Shall I read you a chapter in the Bible, now I am here?"

"I should take it kind if you would, ma'am, very kind indeed; for Mr. Green said he should not be able to come to-day, and my daughter has no time. I could spell a bit over myself, but my eyes fail, and I feel strange and weak. There was a time when I could 'hand, reef, and steer' with the best of them. I was rated 'able seaman' in the Atalante, and for upwards of two years I was 'captain of the fore-top.'"

The visitor sat down and read several chapters. The old man listened with pleasure; his face, seamed and brown with long exposure to the weather, showed no pallor, but there was a look about his eyes that told of a great change, -- they were dim, and sometimes wandering.

"I take this visit very kind of you," he repeated, when she had done; "and I like what you read, -- it did me good; and, ma'am, I'm much obliged to you, and thank you kindly for being so good to my poor boy."

"How do you think he seems, ma'am?" asked Mary Goddard, when they came down together.

"I think he is very much altered, Mary. He does not look to me as if he would live many days."

"Ah, dear heart!" said the daughter. "I was afraid you would say so; and though he be so old, it seems hard to lose him -- for a cheerfuller and honester man never walked this world."

"He seems in a thankful frame of mind now, Mary, and was very attentive while I was reading."

"Oh, yes, he is always pleased with whatever I do for him, and says it is a great mercy he has time, to think of his end; he is vastly pleased now when Mr. Green comes to talk with him, though at first he did not seem to care for it."

The visitor went away. The rain came down all that night and the next day. On the third day she went again to the old fisherman's cottage, and found the old chintz curtain drawn across the window in token of mourning. A neighbor came out of the next cottage and told her that the old man had died that morning at day-break, and that his daughter had walked over to a village some miles inland to tell her brother and his wife.

"Was the old man sensible to the last?" asked the lady.

"As sensible as you are now, ma'am; and often seemed to me to be praying. Would you like to see Matt, ma'am? He is in my house."

"Yes, I wish to see him. What does he know about his great-grandfather?"

"Why, ma'am, when his aunt awoke him and dressed him this morning, she told him that he would not see his grandfather any more, for that God had sent to fetch him."

"He was not frightened, I hope?"

"Oh, no, ma'am -- pleased, wonderfully pleased, and said he wanted to go, too. He is a very strange child."

"Very strange, indeed; but in some respects, I wish we were more like him."

When Matt saw his friend, it reminded him of the great news about his grandfather; and he told her that God had sent for him, adding, "Matt wants to go, too."