e they, or were they not, imaginary? If they were--
well, there was an end of it. But if they were not imaginary; if, as I
now perversely began to think, they were actual sounds, then it
followed, of necessity, that there must be a craft of some sort not very
far from us.

If this were the case, what, I asked myself, was she likely to be? She
could but be one of three things--either a trader, a slaver, or a craft
belonging to the Slave Squadron; the chances, therefore, were about even
that on the morrow I might be able to effect my escape from _La
Mouette_--always provided, of course, that those strokes of the bell had
been real. For if the craft on board which they had been struck
happened to be a trader, the odds were in favour of her being British;
and the same might be said presuming her to be a man-o'-war. On the
other hand, she might of course be a slaver; in which case I was fully
resolved to endure the ills I had, rather than fly to others which might
conceivably be worse.

Thinking thus, and worrying myself as to the best course to be pursued
in certain eventualities, I lay there restlessly tossing first to one
side, then to the other, until at length, sitting up in my bunk and
putting my face to the open port in quest of a breath of fresh air, the
fancy took me that the darkness was no longer quite so opaque as it had
been, nay, I was sure of it, for by putting my face right up against the
circular opening I was enabled to catch an occasional transient gleam of
faint, shifting light that I knew was the glancing of the coming dawn
upon the back of the oily swell that came creeping up to the ship;
while, by directing my glances higher, I found that I was able to make
out indistinctly something of the outline of the great black cloud-
masses that overhung us.

In those latitudes the dawn comes as quickly as the daylight vanishes,
day comes and goes with a rush--thus within five minutes of the time
when I first glanced out through the port there was enough light abroad
to reveal a louring, overcast, thunder-threatening sky, an inky, oil-
smooth, sluggishly undulating sea, and a long, low schooner with
tremendously taunt masts raking over her stern, and not an inch of
canvas set, lying broadside-on to us at a distance of some two miles to
the eastward. When I caught my first glimpse of her she was very little
more than a black blur standing out against the background of scarcely
less black sky; but even as