the
boat into safety, if once free; I had no room for any thought but
this. The great trees along shore, the great fortress, the very clouds
overhead, seemed to fly past me, as I was swept along; but I never lost
sight of my purpose. And now almost within my grasp, I see the boat
and the three figures, who are bending down over one that seems to have
fainted. With my last effort, I cry again to cut the rope, but his knife
has broken at the handle! I touch the side of the skiff, I grasp the
gunwale with one hand, and seizing my sabre in the other, I make one
desperate cut. The boat swings round to the current--the boatman's oars
are out--they are saved. My 'thank God!' is like the cry of a drowning
man--for I know no more.

CHAPTER LIII. A LOSS AND A GAIN

To apologise to my reader for not strictly tracing out each day of my
history, would be, in all likelihood, as great an impertinence as that
of the tiresome guest who, having kept you two hours from your bed by
his uninteresting twaddle, asks you to forgive him at last for an abrupt
departure. I am already too full of gratitude for the patience that has
been conceded to me so far, to desire to trifle with it during the brief
space that is now to link us together. And believe me, kind reader,
there is more in that same tie than perhaps you think, especially where
the intercourse had been carried on, and, as it were, fed from month to
month. In such cases the relationship between him who writes and him who
reads assumes something like acquaintanceship, heightened by a greater
desire on one side to please than is usually felt in the routine
business of everyday life. Nor is it a light reward, if one can think
that he has relieved a passing hour of solitude or discomfort, shortened
a long wintry night, or made a rainy day more endurable. I speak not
here of the greater happiness in knowing that our inmost thoughts
have found their echo in far-away hearts, kindling noble emotions, and
warming generous aspirations--teaching courage and hope, by the very
commonest of lessons, and showing that, in the moral as in the vegetable
world, the bane and antidote grow side by side, and, as the eastern poet
has it, 'He who shakes the tree of sorrow, is often sowing the seeds
of joy.' Such are the triumphs of very different efforts from mine,
however, and I come back to the humble theme from which I started.

If I do not chronicle the incidents which succeeded to the events of