Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/24

6 purpose of ministering to them. The sun rises that you may bask in its rays; the sea breeze blows for the disinterested encouragement of your appetite; the moon and stars are to look at while you smoke before "turning in." That the sea may lull and rock you to sleep is without doubt the final cause of its cradle-like movement, and the sufficient explanation of its soothing sound. You say to yourself as you sink to slumber that the ingenious Dr. Paley could not have anywhere found a more triumphant proof of his great doctrine of design in creation.

As to the spiritual, the intellectual, and even the moral regions of human life—well, at sea there are no such regions. They do not exist in human life. The talk about them which you remember to have heard on land, and to have believed in, had no solid basis in fact. It was a traveller's tale, the fable of some wonder-weaving explorer of the metaphysical ocean who has temporarily taken you in. You know better now. You know, for