nothing else
with which I could hold communion!

"I turned upon my breast and struck out almost frantically once more.
The stars were forgotten; the moon, the very world of which I as yet
formed a part, my poor Mary herself, were forgotten. I thought only of
the strong man there perishing; of me in my lusty manhood, in the sharp
vigor of my dawning prime, with faculties illimitable, with senses all
alert, battling there with physical obstacles which men like myself had
brought together for my undoing. The Eternal could never have willed
this thing! I could not and I would not perish thus. And I grew strong
in insolence of self-trust; and I laughed aloud as I dashed the sluggish
water from side to side.

"Then came an emotion of pity for myself of wild regret; of sorrow, Oh,
infinite for a fate so desolate, a doom so dreary, so heart-sickening!
You may laugh at the contradiction if you will, sir, but I felt that
I could sacrifice my own life on the instant, to redeem another
fellow-creature from such a place of horror, from an end so piteous.
My soul and my vital spirit seemed in that desperate moment to be
separating; while one in parting grieved over the deplorable fate of the
other.

"And then I prayed! I prayed, why or wherefore I know not. It was not
from fear. It could not have been in hope. The days of miracles are
past, and there was no natural law by whose providential interposition I
could be saved. I did not pray; it prayed of itself, my soul within me.

"Was the calmness that I now felt torpidity--the torpidity that precedes
dissolution to the strong swimmer who, sinking from exhaustion, must at
last add a bubble to the wave as he suffocates beneath the element which
now denied his mastery? If it were so, how fortunate was it that my
floating rod at that moment attracted my attention as it dashed through
the water by me. I saw on the instant that a fish had entangled itself
in the wire noose. The rod quivered, plunged, came again to the surface,
and rippled the water as it shot in arrowy flight from side to side of
the tank. At last, driven toward the southeast corner of the Reservoir,
the small end seemed to have got foul somewhere. The brazen butt, which,
every time the fish sounded, was thrown up to the moon, now sank by its
own weight, showing that the other end must be fast. But the cornered
fish, evidently anchored somewhere by that short wire, floundered
several times to the surface before I though