t to have come there at all," may be replied.

Say that to the huntsman who has got into a field with the only way out
of it over a chasm to leap. Tell it to the mountain climber scrambling
down, who pauses before a _crevasse_; and do not forget to say the same
to the poor old fisherman overtaken in the midnight winter's gale with
his life in one hand and in the other a tangled net that has caught the
fried sole for your comfortable dinner.

It would not do of course to go into my cabin. In the first place, the
dingey was there, and then if I were to be enclosed inside when anything
like a "run down" had to be dealt with, the cabin might be my coffin.

First I tried to crouch down in the well, but the constraint on limbs and
joints was unbearable. My head slept while my knees ached with the
pressure. No! there must be a positive lying down to sleep, if the sleep
is to give true refreshment when you are rocked about on the waters; and
this you have no doubt been convinced of any time at sea.

The strange twists of body I tried to fit into comfortably where the
space (in the well) was only three feet each way, reached at last to the
grotesque--the absurd contortions of a man miserable on a pleasure
jaunt--and I laughed aloud, but somehow it sounded hollow and uncanny.

As to the exact spot where the Rob Roy was at this particular time we had
of course no possible idea, but judging from after circumstances, the
position must have been about ten miles south of St. Catherine's Head,
and she drifted twenty miles east while I dreamed.

[Picture: Bed of the Sea]

One effect of extreme exhaustion is to make the mind almost reckless of
risk, and we can well understand how in some shipwrecks, after days and
nights without sleep, men are in a placid, callous composure of sheer
weariness, and that the last agony of drowning then is nothing, just as
Dr. Livingstone told me, the shake given by a lion to his victim
paralyses the whole system before it is killed. Therefore, as danger was
only likely, and sleep was imperative, I must have sleep at all hazards,
and so we loosed out the folds of the main-sail on the wet deck. How
white and creamy they looked while all was dark around, for no moon had
risen. Then I put on my life-belt, and fastened the ship's light where
it would not swing, but rested quite close to the deck. I rolled the
thick, dry, and ample main-sail round me, stretching my limbs in c