As the calker goes through the hold of the ship, peering intently for
light, or listening for the trickling of water, so should you, in
observing your sister's character and family peculiarities, find and
calk up all the treacherous leaks in your own nature. Her carelessness
is your forgetfulness. Mend it. Her heedlessness is undoubtedly your
recklessness. Send out scouts. Her impatience is possibly your high
temper. Hit yourself when you are in rage, and thus learn its folly. I
know of a man who once came within an inch of braining his
fellow-soldier. They were lying on the grass, when the fellow struck my
friend a smart blow with the iron ramrod of a Springfield musket, all in
fun, you know. My friend was like Cowper, who wrote:
The man who hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves, by thumping on your back
His sense of your great merit,
Is such a friend as one had need
Be very much his friend, indeed,
To pardon or to bear it.
Well, he felt the smart of the iron ramrod, and his fury rose in a
whirlwind; and he got up, took the musket by the barrel, raised it back
for an awful blow, and was just about to crush the head of the joker
when a white face and the simple word "Jim!" brought him to his senses.
He dropped the musket and sank upon the grass in a paroxysm of
excitement, but was saved from murder just by a hair's breadth. He had
never curbed his temper before. Here he had been forced to overcome the
fury of a building all in flames. The lesson sank deep into his heart.
To-day nobody knows he has any temper at all.