A Strange SeaStory A Temperance Tale Author:Julia McNair Wright General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1877 Original Publisher: National Temperance Society and publication house Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access ... more »to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III. A DEMON ON THE SHIP. " Over the moaning and rainy sea Looked for tlie coming that might not be : What did the winds and sea-birds say Of the cruel Captain that sailed away ?" T was Captain Lois who bought the rum and the ale, and placed them on the "Recruit" for his own use: he did it with the recklessness of a man lashed by a keen consciousness of guilt, and madly resolved to heap up his iniquities, and be as bad as he could: as children of a lesser growth, say that they ' don't care,' when they have committed some juvenile peccadillo, and immediately set themselves to commit several more. But when a man does some great wrong, there is generally not only the inner temptation of a heart astray, but the outer suggestion, or persuasion, of the demon in some human form; and now Captain Lois was pressed along in his evil path, by the deliberate malice and wickedness of his first mate, James Nagle. For purchasing liquor, and meaning to drink it, was even more a sin in Orson Lois than in other men, for he knew that when once the liquor had inflamed his brain, he was driven to frightful excesses, demonized, whirled into phrenzies of passion, so that neither his own life nor the lives oi his fellow-men were safe in his hands. James Nagle had not so pleasant memories of the outbreaks of his Captain in Japan and California, that he desired to re-encounter them for their own sake : but in California Captain Lois had struck the mate twice ; he had abused him before the sailors -- and James Nagle was not of the ' dearly b...« less