Page:Diary of ten years.djvu/25

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Sunday, 25th.–Read church service and a sermon as usual. Robert has absented himself on this and the preceding Sunday, without any good or apparent cause; I must remonstrate;–strongly impressed myself with the many mercies of a kind Providence, and the dependence of His creatures on Him for each moment of their existence, every circumstance of their prosperity, and every hope of future happiness, I consider myself involved in the fate of those who have accompanied me, and bound to confirm them, as far as I am able, in religious principles and observances.

Weather fine, but warm and close; a numerous shoal of porpoises have come rushing towards the ship with great violence. "They are just like sheep sporting in a field," said Letty, and it was not a bad simile for their boundings and gambols; and although it was comical enough to see these animals floundering about, I could not help feeling some alarm on the recollection of an observation Captain Cook makes somewhere in his voyages, "that the playing of