horrible
contraction, exposing the teeth. One side of her face was swollen from
some blow.

Looking over the shoulders of two ladies who were trembling and leaning
against the deck-railing, Ferragut caught a glimpse of this corpse. In
his turn the vigorous sailor trembled like a woman, and his eyes filmed
with mistiness. He simply could not look at it!... And again he went
down into his stateroom to hide himself.

An Italian torpedo-destroyer was maneuvering among the remains of the
shipwreck, as though seeking the footprints of the author of the crime.
The steamers stopped their circular course of exploration to lower the
lifeboats into the water and collect the corpses and bodies of the
living near to death.

The captain in his desperate imprisonment heard new shrieks announcing
an extraordinary event. Again the cruel necessity of knowing what it
could be dragged him from his stateroom!

A boat full of people had been found by the steamer. The other ships
were also meeting little by little the rest of the life boats occupied
by the survivors of the catastrophe. The general rescue was going to be
a very short piece of work.

The most agile of the shipwrecked people, on reaching the deck, found
themselves surrounded by sympathetic groups lamenting their misfortune
and at the same time offering them hot drinks. Others, after staggering
a few steps as though intoxicated, collapsed on the benches. Some had
to be hoisted from the bottom of the boat and carried in a chair to the
ship's hospital.

Various British soldiers, serene and phlegmatic, upon climbing on deck
asked for a pipe and began to smoke vigorously. Other shipwrecked
people, lightly clad, simply rolled themselves up in shawls, beginning
the account of the catastrophe as minutely and serenely as though they
were in a parlor. A period of ten hours in the crowded narrowness of
the boat, drifting at random in the hope of aid, had not broken down
their energy.

The women showed greater desperation. Ferragut saw in the center of a
group of ladies a young English girl, blond, slender, elegant, who was
sobbing and stammering explanations. She had found herself in a launch,
separated from her parents, without knowing how. Perhaps they were dead
by this time. Her slight hope was that they might have sought refuge in
some other boat and been picked up by any one of the steamers that had
happened to see them.

A desperate grief, noisy, meridional, silenced with