It might be your fate or mine at any time as easily as his.

He was just from Liverpool, having been shipwrecked on the English coast, and on his way home to Washington, expecting to see his wife and children in a few days.

Poor fellow! This will be a terrible blow to his family and friends.

His fate, so sudden, is enough to make any man who IS a man, think seriously of his 'better end' of what may become of him hereafter!" He clinched this remark, which he delivered with much energy, with an oath that almost made my hair stand on end, and struck me at the time as being singularly out of place in that connection.
With another deep-drawn sigh he dismissed the subject, and did not again allude to it.

He spoke of the "embargo act," of various ingenious modes of evading it, and of the prospect of a war with England; and made some assertion in relation to proceedings in Congress, which, in a respectful manner, but to his great astonishment, I ventured to dispute on the authority of a paragraph I had seen in a New York newspaper a few days before.