e, and there were the sweet stars once more; for
many an eye they had gone Out for ever; and there the burning wreck.

A man floundered near me, in a splutter of phosphorescence. I tried to
help him, and in an instant he had me wildly round the neck. In the end
I shook him off, poor devil, to his death. And he was the last I tried
to aid: have I not said already what I was become?

In a little an oar floated my way: I threw my arms across it and gripped
it with my chin as I swam. It relieved me greatly. Up and down I rode
among the oily black hillocks; I was down when there was a sudden flare
as though the sun had risen, and I saw still a few heads bobbing and a
few arms waving frantically around me. At the same instant a terrific
detonation split the ears; and when I rose on the next bald billow,
where the ship lay burning a few seconds before, there remained but a
red-hot spine that hissed and dwindled for another minute, and then left
a blackness through which every star shone with redoubled brilliance.

And now right and left splashed falling missiles; a new source of danger
or of temporary respite; to me, by a merciful Providence, it proved the
latter.

Some heavy thing fell with a mighty splash right in front of me. A few
more yards, and my brains had floated with the spume. As it was, the
oar was dashed from under my armpits; in another moment they had found a
more solid resting-place.

It was a hen-coop, and it floated bars upwards like a boat. In this
calm it might float for days. I climbed upon the bars-and the whole cage
rolled over on top of me.

Coming to the surface, I found to my joy that the hen-coop had righted
itself; so now I climbed up again, but this time very slowly and
gingerly; the balance was undisturbed, and I stretched myself cautiously
along the bars on my stomach. A good idea immediately occurred to me. I
had jumped as a matter of course into the flannels which one naturally
wears in the tropics. To their lightness I already owed my life, but the
common cricket-belt which was part of the costume was the thing to which
I owe it most of all. Loosening this belt a little, as I tucked my toes
tenaciously under the endmost bar, I undid and passed the two ends under
one of the middle bars, fastening the clasp upon the other side. If I
capsized now, well, we might go to the bottom together; otherwise the
hen-coop and I should not part company in a hurry; and I thought, I
felt, that she would