He thought it was Sunday and that he was going to church with his mother
and Nell; and that he was late, as usual, and they were calling him to
hurry.

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" he screamed out in such a shrill voice,
attenuated by famine, as hardly to be recognised as human, so shrill
that it startled the sea-gulls hovering over the boat. "I'm coming!
There's lots of time, the bells are ringing still! The bells are
ringing, I hear them!--Ring--ring--ring--I--hear--I hear--I--"

Then he, too, lost consciousness and fell, like a log, insensible,
across the body of poor Dick; the far-off bell which he had fancied to
be ringing miles and miles distant from where the boat was floating in
the Channel, being the last echo that sounded in his ears as he fainted
away.

But, there was reason in his madness.

A bell was ringing; and ringing too realistically not to be real!

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN.

ON THE CASQUETTES.

Bob's hearing was not at fault, this sense of his remaining perfect
though his mind was wandering; and so, the unwonted sound that fell upon
his ear had got woven amongst his delirious fancies.

It was, without doubt, a real bell, which if it might not summon pious
folk to prayer, yet fulfilled almost as sacred a duty, warning, as it
did, poor mariners of impending peril and so answering the petition oft
put up "for those travelling by sea."

This ball belonged to the lighthouse-tower erected on the highest peak
of the Casquettes, a terrible group of rocks jutting out into the
Channel, just off the French coast hard by Alderney, some six miles to
the north-west of which island they lie. Rocks that are cruel and
relentless as the surges that sweep over them in stormy weather, and
which are so quaintly named from their helmet, or "casque"-like
resemblance--rocks, concerning which the poet Swinburne has sung in his
eloquent verse, that breathes the very spirit of the sea in depicting
the strife of the elements:

"From the depths of the waters that lighten and darken,
With change everlasting of life and of death,
Where hardly by morn if the lulled ear hearken
It hears the sea's as a tired child's breath,
Where hardly by night, if an eye dare scan it,
The storm lets shipwreck be seen or heard,
As the reefs to the waves and the foam to the granite
Respond one merciless word.

"Sheer seen and far, in the sea's life heaven,
A sea-mew's flight from the wild sweet land,
White plume