ath that burning sun,
Felipe and Truxill had brought down to their hut many scores of
tortoises, and tried out the oil, when, elated with their good success,
and to reward themselves for such hard work, they, too hastily, made a
catamaran, or Indian raft, much used on the Spanish main, and merrily
started on a fishing trip, just without a long reef with many jagged
gaps, running parallel with the shore, about half a mile from it. By
some bad tide or hap, or natural negligence of joyfulness (for though
they could not be heard, yet by their gestures they seemed singing at
the time) forced in deep water against that iron bar, the ill-made
catamaran was overset, and came all to pieces; when dashed by
broad-chested swells between their broken logs and the sharp teeth of
the reef, both adventurers perished before Hunilla's eyes.

Before Hunilla's eyes they sank. The real woe of this event passed
before her sight as some sham tragedy on the stage. She was seated on a
rude bower among the withered thickets, crowning a lofty cliff, a little
back from the beach. The thickets were so disposed, that in looking upon
the sea at large she peered out from among the branches as from the
lattice of a high balcony. But upon the day we speak of here, the better
to watch the adventure of those two hearts she loved, Hunilla had
withdrawn the branches to one side, and held them so. They formed an
oval frame, through which the bluely boundless sea rolled like a painted
one. And there, the invisible painter painted to her view the
wave-tossed and disjointed raft, its once level logs slantingly
upheaved, as raking masts, and the four struggling arms
indistinguishable among them; and then all subsided into smooth-flowing
creamy waters, slowly drifting the splintered wreck; while first and
last, no sound of any sort was heard. Death in a silent picture; a dream
of the eye; such vanishing shapes as the mirage shows.

So instant was the scene, so trance-like its mild pictorial effect, so
distant from her blasted bower and her common sense of things, that
Hunilla gazed and gazed, nor raised a finger or a wail. But as good to
sit thus dumb, in stupor staring on that dumb show, for all that
otherwise might be done. With half a mile of sea between, how could her
two enchanted arms aid those four fated ones? The distance long, the
time one sand. After the lightning is beheld, what fool shall stay the
thunder-bolt? Felipe's body was washed ashore, but Tr