a little bottle out of my pocket, and I held it to her nose, and rubbed her temples, and what else I could do, but still Amy showed no signs of life, till I felt for her pulse, but could hardly distinguish her to be alive. However, after a great while, she began to revive, and in about half-an-hour she came to herself, but remembered nothing at first of what had happened to her for a good while more.
When she recovered more fully, she asked me where she was. I told her she was in the ship yet, but God knows how long it might be. 'Why, madam', says she, 'is not the storm over?' 'No, no', says I, 'Amy.' 'Why, madam', says she, 'it was calm just now' (meaning when she was in the swooning fit occasioned by her fall). 'Calm, Amy!' says I. 'Tis far from calm. It may be it will be calm by-and-by, when we are all drowned and gone to heaven.'
'Heaven, madam!' says she. 'What makes you talk so? Heaven! I go to heaven! No, no; if I am drowned I am damned! Don't you know what a wicked creature I have been? I have been a whore to two men, and have lived a wretched, abominable life of vice and wickedness for fourteen years. Oh, madam! you know it, and God knows it, and now I am to die—to be drowned! Oh! what will become of me? I am undone for ever!—ay, madam, for ever! to all eternity! Oh! I am lost! I am lost! If I am drowned, I am lost for ever!'
All these, you will easily suppose, must be so many stabs into the very soul of one in my own case. It immediately occurred to me, 'Poor Amy! what art thou that I am not? What hast thou been that I have not been? Nay, I am guilty of my own sin and thine too.' Then it came to my remembrance that I had not only been the same with Amy, but that I had been the devil's instrument to make her wicked; that I had stripped her, and prostituted her to the very man that I had been naught with myself; that she had but followed me, I had been her wicked example; and I had led her into all; and that, as we had sinned together, now we were likely to sink together.
All this repeated itself to my thoughts at that very moment, and every one of Amy's cries sounded thus in my ears: 'I am the wicked cause of it all! I have been thy ruin, Amy! I have brought thee to this, and now thou art to suffer for the sin I have enticed thee to! And if thou art lost for ever, what must I be? what must be my portion?'
It is true, this difference was between us, that I said all these things within myself, and sighed and mourned inwardly; but Amy, as her temper was more violent, spoke aloud, and cried, and called out aloud, like one in agony.
I had but small encouragement to give her, and indeed could say but very little, but I got her to compose herself a little, and not let any of the people of the ship understand what she meant, or what she said; but even in her greatest composure she continued to express herself with the utmost dread and terror on account of the wicked life she had lived, crying out she should be damned, and the like, which was very terrible to me, who knew what condition I was in myself.
Upon these serious considerations, I was very penitent too for my former sins, and cried out, though softly, two or three times 'Lord, have mercy upon me!' To this I added abundance of resolutions of what a life I would live, if it should please God but to spare my life but this one time; how I would live a single and a virtuous life, and spend a great deal of what I had thus wickedly got in acts of charity and doing good.
