al and altogether absent way. The long
talk with me about his past had exhausted him, I thought; and he did
not seem disposed to speak again. It was then near mid-day, and the
sun, being right above us, poured down an intolerable heat, so that the
paint of the dinghy was hot to the hand, and we ourselves were consumed
with an unquenchable thirst. Nor could I restrain myself, but drank
long draughts from the water-kegs, while Black kept to liquor; and was,
I saw with fear, rapidly working himself up to a state of intoxication.
You may ask if the terrors of the position came home to us thoroughly
in that long day when we rode in a bit of a cockle-shell on the
sweeping rollers of the Atlantic, but I answer you, I do not think that
they did. The fear of such a position is the after-recollection of it.
We were in a sense numbed to mental apprehension by the vigour of the
physical suffering we endured, by that overwhelming thirst, by the
devouring heat, by the cutting spray which drove upon our faces, by the
stiffening of our clothes when the sun scorched them. Seethed in the
brine one hour, we were nigh burnt up the next; and yet we knew that
water would soon fail us--that we could not hope for life for many days
unless we should sight some ship, and she in turn should sight us.

It is, perhaps, only in a small boat that one appreciates the magnitude
of an Atlantic wave, even when the ocean seems comparatively still.
Sometimes on a steamer's deck, when there is heavy wind and the sea is
driven before it, you may watch a huge roller sweeping the great vessel
as a pond wave will sweep a match; but at any time from a boat, which
is, as it were, right down upon the water, you cannot fail to be
impressed by the onward flow of those mighty translucent billows, which
rush forward in their course and thunder at last upon the granite rocks
of the western face of Europe. High above you in one moment as hills of
emerald and silver, you wait with nerves all braced up as they come
upon you, giving promise that you will be engulfed in the liquid bosom
of the towering mountain; and you breathe again as your boat is taken
in their swift embrace, and you are borne far above the darker ravine
of the sea to a pinnacle of spreading foam, whence you may look to the
distant horizon in that search for other ships; which may be pastime,
or may be, as in our case, a search on which your very life depends.

How often during that long afternoon, when