n salt water. There was a
moment of awful silence: we could not tell whether the light of day
would ever visit us again; we thought perhaps it wouldn't. But the
Petrel rose once more upon the watery hilltops and shook herself free of
the cumbersome deluge; and at that point, when she seemed to be riding
more easily than usual, some one broke the silence: "Well, did the
captain of the Perle live to tell the tale?"

Yes, he did. God sent a messenger into the lonesome deep, where the
miserable man was found insensible, with eyes wide open against the
sunlight, and lips shrunken apart--a hideous breathing corpse. When he
was lifted in the arms of the brave fellows who had gone to his rescue,
he cried "Great God! am I saved?" as though he couldn't believe it when
it was true: then he fainted, and was nursed through a long delirium,
and was at last restored to health and home and happiness.

Our cabin-boy managed to fish up the lamp, and after a little we were
illuminated: the agile swab soon sponged out the cabin, and we resumed
our tedious watch for dawn and fairer weather.

Somehow, my mind brooded over the solitary wreck that was drifting about
the sea: I could fancy the rotten timbers of the Perle clinging
together, by a miracle, until the Ancient Mariner was taken away from
her, and then, when she was alone again, with nothing whatever in sight
but blank blue sea and blank blue sky, she lay for an hour or so,
bearded with shaggy sea-moss and looking about a thousand years old.
Suddenly it occurred to her that her time had come--that she had
outlived her usefulness, and might as well go to pieces at once. So she
yawned in all her timbers, and the sea reached up over her, and laid
hold of her masts, and seemed to be slowly drawing her down into its
bosom. There was not an audible sound, and scarcely a ripple upon the
water, but when the waves had climbed into the foretop, there was a
clamor of affrighted birds, and a myriad bubbles shot up to the surface,
where a few waifs floated and whirled about for a moment. It was all
that marked the spot where the Perle went down to her eternal rest.

"Ha, ha!" cried our skipper, with something almost like a change of
expression on his mahogany countenance, "the barometer is rising!" and
sure enough it was. In two hours the Petrel acted like a different craft
entirely, and by and by came daybreak, and after that the sea went down,
down, down, into a deep, dead calm, when all the