float.

Worn out as I was, and comparatively secure for the moment, I will not
say that I slept; but my eyes closed, and every fibre rested, as I rose
and slid with the smooth, long swell. Whether I did indeed hear voices,
curses, cries, I cannot say positively to this day. I only know that I
raised my head and looked sharply all ways but the way I durst not look
for fear of an upset. And, again, I thought I saw first a tiny flame,
and then a tinier glow; and as my head drooped, and my eyes closed
again, I say I thought I smelt tobacco; but this, of course, was my
imagination supplying all the links from one.

CHAPTER IV. THE SILENT SEA

Remember (if indeed there be any need to remind you) that it is a
flagrant landsman who is telling you this tale. Nothing know I of
seamanship, save what one could not avoid picking up on the round voyage
of the Lady Jermyn, never to be completed on this globe. I may be told
that I have burned that devoted vessel as nothing ever burned on land or
sea. I answer that I write of what I saw, and that is not altered by a
miscalled spar or a misunderstood manouvre. But now I am aboard a craft
I handle for myself, and must make shift to handle a second time with
this frail pen.

The hen-coop was some six feet long, by eighteen or twenty inches in
breadth and depth. It was simply a long box with bars in lieu of a lid;
but it was very strongly built.

I recognized it as one of two which had stood lashed against either rail
of the Lady Jermyn's poop; there the bars had risen at right angles to
the deck; now they lay horizontal, a gridiron six feet long-and my bed.
And as each particular bar left its own stripe across my wearied body,
and yet its own comfort in my quivering heart, another day broke over
the face of the waters, and over me.

Discipline, what there was of it originally, had been the very first
thing to perish aboard our ill-starred ship; the officers, I am afraid,
were not much better than poor Ready made them out (thanks to Bendigo
and Ballarat), and little had been done in true ship-shape style all
night. All hands had taken their spell at everything as the fancy seized
them; not a bell had been struck from first to last; and I can only
conjecture that the fire raged four or five hours, from the fact that
it was midnight by my watch when I left it on my cabin drawers, and that
the final extinction of the smouldering keel was so soon followed by the
first deep hi