"Your notions of safety, my dear Nanny," she said, "are not precisely those of a seaman; for I believe there is nothing of which they stand more in dread than of rocks and the bottom."
"I fear I'm but a poor sailor, ma'am, for in my judgment we could have no greater consolation in such a tempest than to see them all around us. Do you think, Miss Eve, that the bottom of the ocean, if there is truly a bottom, is whitened with the bones of shipwrecked mariners, as people say?"
"I doubt not, my excellent Nanny, that the great deep might give up many awful secrets; but you ought to think less of these things, and more of that merciful Providence which has protected us through so many dangers since we have been wanderers. You are in much less danger now than I have known you to be, and escape unharmed."
"I, Miss Eve!--Do you suppose that I fear for myself? What matters it if a poor old woman like me die a few years sooner or later or where her frail old body is laid? I have never been of so much account when living as to make it of consequence where the little which will remain to decay when dead moulders into dust. Do not, I implore you, Miss Effingham, suppose me so selfish as to feel any uneasiness to-night on my own account."
"Is it then, as usual, all for me, my dear, my worthy old nurse, that you feel this anxiety? Put your heart at ease, for they who know best betray no alarm; and you may observe that the captain sleeps as tranquilly this night as on any other."
"But he is a rude man, and accustomed to danger. He has neither wife nor children, and I'll engage has never given a thought to the horrors of having a form precious as this floating in the caverns of the ocean, amidst ravenous fish and sea-monsters."
Here her imagination overcame poor Nanny Sidley, and she folded her arms about the beautiful person of Eve, and sobbed violently. Her young mistress, accustomed to similar exhibitions of affection, soothed her with blandishments and assurances that soon restored her self-command, when the dialogue was resumed with a greater appearance of tranquillity on the part of the nurse. They conversed a few minutes on the subject of their reliance on God, Eve returning fourfold, or with the advantages of a cultivated intellect, many of those simple lessons of faith and humility that she had received from her companion when a child; the latter listening, as she always did, to these exhortations, which sounded in her ears, like the echoes of all her own better thoughts, with a love and reverence no other could awaken. Eve passed her small white hand over the wrinkled cheek of Nanny in kind fondling, as it had been passed a thousand times when a child, an act she well knew her nurse delighted in, and continued,--