However, when night came round again, they wished they had yet the day;
it was so dark, so dreary, so eerie, pitching and rolling about there,
carried hither and thither as the tide listed, with never a vista of the
wished-for land, with never a sound but the sobbing sea.

Yet, it was wonderful how the boys encouraged each other to bear up and
be hopeful, in spite of everything.

Whenever, in the early morning previously and during the day in their
respective sufferings, one or the other grew despondent Dick cheered Bob
and Bob cheered Dick, as the case might be.

Then, somehow or other, the principal portion of the cheering-up work
was borne by Dick; the very brightness and look of everything, even
while he noticed them, seeming to have the effect of depressing Bob's
spirits by some unknown association or connection with those at home.

At night, however, it was Bob's turn to sustain the drooping courage of
Dick, who, like most country-bred lads, was intensely superstitious,
fancying the darkness to swarm with ghosts and goblins, who were on the
watch to devour him; the boy, while bearing up bravely against palpable
privations and open dangers, staring them in the face, from which grown
men would have quailed, was now affected by silly fears which a baby
would have blushed to own!

All through the wearisome hours of the dragging night, whose minutes
were as iron and hours like lead, he was constantly starting up in
nervous terror; the moan of the sea, the cry of some belated sea-gull,
the plunge of a fish in the water, nay even the creaking of the boat's
own timbers, with each and all of which Dick was perfectly familiar,
alike arousing his frenzied alarm.

It was, "Lawks, Master Bob! what be this now?" throughout the terrible
interval that elapsed between the fading of the twilight on the one day
and sunrise on the next. "Lor', what's that?"

And, that next day!

The boys were weaker then, for very nearly eight-and-forty hours had
elapsed since they had been on board the cutter; forty-eight hours
without food, without any regular sleep, without any real rest even, as
their attention was always kept on the alert, while, all the time, the
peril they were in was sufficient alone to have crushed their every
energy!

Hope, undying hope that had kept them up so long, now left them at last.
Who could hope against such continual disappointment, with ships all
around them sometimes and yet never a one to come near w