ly gales and resume her travels.
Occasional rains replenished the stock of fresh water, but the food
they found at first, with the exception of some cans of fruit, was all
that came to light; for the salt meat was leathery, and crumbled to a
salty dust on exposure to the air. After a while their stomachs
revolted at the diet of cold soup, and they ate only when hunger
compelled them.

At first they had stood watch-and-watch, but the lonely horror of the
long night vigils in the constant apprehension of instant death had
affected them alike, and they gave it up, sleeping and watching
together. They had taken care of their boat and provisioned it, ready
to lower and pull into the track of any craft that might approach. But
it was four months from the beginning of this strange voyage when the
two men, gaunt and hungry--with ruined digestions and shattered
nerves--saw, with joy which may be imagined, the first land and the
first sail that gladdened their eyes after the storm in the Florida
Channel.

A fierce gale from the southwest had been driving them, broadside on,
in the trough of the sea, for the whole of the preceding day and night;
and the land they now saw appeared to them a dark, ragged line of blue,
early in the morning. Boston could only surmise that it was the coast
of Portugal or Spain. The sail--which lay between them and the land,
about three miles to leeward--proved to be the try-sail of a black
craft, hove-to, with bows nearly towards them.

Boston climbed the foremast with their only flag and secured it; then,
from the high poop-deck, they watched the other craft, plunging and
wallowing in the immense Atlantic combers, often raising her forefoot
into plain view, again descending with a dive that hid the whole
forward half in a white cloud of spume.

"If she was a steamer I'd call her a cruiser," said Boston; "one of
England's black ones, with a storm-sail on her military mainmast. She
has a ram bow, and--yes, sponsors and guns. That's what she is, with
her funnels and bridge carried away."

"Isn't she right in our track, Boston?" asked the doctor, excitedly.
"Hadn't she better get out of our way?"

"She's got steam up--a full head; sec the escape-jet? She isn't
helpless. If she don't launch a boat, we'll take to ours and board
her."

The distance lessened rapidly--the cruiser plunging up and down in the
same spot, the derelict heaving to leeward in great, swinging leaps, as
the successiv