along with me to Midway Island all the
writers and the prating artists of my time. Day after day of hope
deferred, of heat, of unremitting toil; night after night of aching
limbs, bruised hands, and a mind obscured with the grateful vacancy of
physical fatigue. The scene, the nature of my employment, the rugged
speech and faces of my fellow-toilers, the glare of the day on deck, the
stinking twilight in the bilge, the shrill myriads of the ocean-fowl;
above all, the sense of our immitigable isolation from the world and
from the current epoch--keeping another time, some eras old; the new day
heralded by no daily paper, only by the rising sun; and the State, the
churches, the peopled empires, war, and the rumours of war, and the
voices of the arts, all gone silent as in the days ere they were yet
invented. Such were the conditions of my new experience in life, of
which (if I had been able) I would have had all my confreres and
contemporaries to partake, forgetting, for that while, the orthodoxies
of the moment, and devoted to a single and material purpose under the
eye of heaven.

Of the nature of our task I must continue to give some summary idea. The
forecastle was lumbered with ship's chandlery, the hold nigh full of
rice, the lazarette crowded with the teas and silks. These must all be
dug out; and that made but a fraction of our task. The hold was ceiled
throughout; a part, where perhaps some delicate cargo was once stored,
had been lined, in addition, with inch boards; and between every beam
there was a movable panel into the bilge. Any of these, the bulkheads
of the cabins, the very timbers of the hull itself, might be the place
of hiding. It was therefore necessary to demolish, as we proceeded, a
great part of the ship's inner skin and fittings, and to auscultate what
remained, like a doctor sounding for a lung disease. Upon the return,
from any beam or bulkhead, of a doubtful sound, we must up axe and hew
into the timber: a violent and--from the amount of dry rot in the
wreck--a mortifying exercise. Every night saw a deeper inroad into the
bones of the _Flying Scud_--more beams tapped and hewn in splinters,
more planking peeled away and tossed aside--and every night saw us as
far as ever from the end and object of our arduous devastation. In this
perpetual disappointment, my courage did not fail me, but my spirits
dwindled; and Nares himself grew silent and morose. At night, when
supper was done, we passed an hou