of these perishing souls was a mere
lad: he too accused himself bitterly. He began his story at the
beginning, and continued it from time to time as the spirit of
revelation moved him: scarcely an incident, however insignificant,
escaped him in his pitiless retrospect. Oh the keen agony of that boy's
recital! more cruel than hunger or thirst, and in comparison with which
physical torture would have seemed merciful and any death a blessing.

While the luckless Perle drifted aimlessly about, driven slowly onward
by varying winds under a cheerless sky, sickness visited them: some were
stricken with scurvy; some had lost the use of their limbs and lay
helpless, moaning and weeping hour after hour; vermin devoured them,
and when their garments were removed and cleansed in the salt water,
there was scarcely sunshine enough to dry them before night, and they
were put on again, damp, stiffened with salt, and shrunken so as to
cripple the wearers, who were all blistered and covered with boils. The
nights were bitter cold: sometimes the icy moon looked down upon them;
sometimes the bosom of an electric cloud burst over them, and they were
enveloped for a moment in a sheet of flame. Sharks lingered about them,
waiting to feed upon the unhappy ones who fell into the sea overcome
with physical exhaustion, or who cast themselves from that dizzy
scaffold, unable longer to endure the horrors of lingering death. Flocks
of sea-fowl hovered over them; the hull of the Perle was crusted with
barnacles; long skeins of sea-grass knotted themselves in her gaping
seams; myriads of fish darted in and out among the clinging weeds,
sporting gleefully; schools of porpoises leaped about them, lashing the
sea into foam; sometimes a whale blew his long breath close under them.
Everywhere was the stir of jubilant life--everywhere but under the
tattered awning stretched in the foretop of the Perle.

Days and weeks dragged on. When the captain would waken from his
sleep--which was not always at night, however, for the nights were
miserably cold and sleepless--when he wakened he would call the roll:
perhaps some one made no answer; then he would reach forth and touch the
speechless body and find it dead. He had not strength now to bury the
corpses in the sea's sepulchre; he had not strength even to partake of
the unholy feast of the inanimate flesh: he lay there in the midst of
pestilence, and at night, under the merciful veil of darkness, the fowls
of t