r the
tossing sea, troubled still as during the sway of the monsoons.

Since leaving Ha-Long more than one patient died, and was consigned to
the deep water on the high road to France; many of the narrow beds no
longer bore their suffering burdens.

Upon this particular day it was very gloomy in the travelling hospital;
on account of the high seas it had been necessary to close the iron
port-lids, which made the stifling sick-room more unbearable. Sylvestre
was worse; the end was nigh. Lying always upon his wounded side, he
pressed upon it with both hands with all his remaining strength, to try
and allay the watery decomposition that rose in his right lung, and to
breathe with the other lung only. But by degrees the other was affected
and the ultimate agony had begun.

Dreams and visions of home haunted his brain; in the hot darkness,
beloved or horrible faces bent over him; he was in a never-ending
hallucination, through which floated apparitions of Brittany and
Iceland. In the morning was called in the priest, and the old man, who
was used to seeing sailors die, was astonished to find so pure a soul in
so strong and manly a body.

He cried out for air, air! but there was none anywhere; the ventilators
no long gave any; the attendant, who was fanning him with a Chinese
fan, only moved unhealthy vapours over him of sickening staleness, which
revolted all lungs. Sometimes fierce, desperate fits came over him; he
wished to tear himself away from that bed, where he felt death would
come to seize him, and rush above into the full fresh wind and try to
live again. Oh! to be like those others, scrambling about among the
rigging, and living among the masts. But his extreme effort only
ended in the feeble lifting of his weakened head; something like the
incompleted movement of a sleeper. He could not manage it, but fell back
in the hollow of his crumpled bed, partly chained there by death; and
each time, after the fatigue of a like shock, he lost all consciousness.

To please him they opened a port at last, although it was dangerous, the
sea being very rough. It was going on for six in the evening. When the
disk was swung back, a red light entered, glorious and radiant. The
dying sun appeared upon the horizon in dazzling splendour, through a
torn rift in a gloomy sky; its blinding light glanced over the waves,
and lit up the floating hospital, like a waving torch.

But no air rushed in; the little there was outside, was p