was the breeze: fleecy clouds flew with
vast rapidity across her bright face, and it was by fitful though vivid
glances Staines examined the raft and his companion.

The raft was large, and well made of timbers tied and nailed together,
and a strong rail ran round it resting on several uprights. There were
also some blocks of a very light wood screwed to the horizontal timbers,
and these made it float high.

But what arrested and fascinated the man's gaze was his dead companion,
sole survivor, doubtless, of a horrible voyage, since the raft was not
made for one, nor by one.

It was a skeleton, or nearly, whose clothes the seabirds had torn, and
pecked every limb in all the fleshy parts; the rest of the body had
dried to dark leather on the bones. The head was little more than an
eyeless skull; but in the fitful moonlight, those huge hollow
caverns seemed gigantic lamp-like eyes, and glared at him fiendishly,
appallingly.

He sickened at the sight. He tried not to look at it; but it would be
looked at, and threaten him in the moonlight, with great lack-lustre
eyes.

The wind whistled, and lashed his face with spray torn off the big
waves, and the water was nearly up to his knees, and the raft tossed
so wildly, it was all he could do to hold on in his corner: in which
struggle, still those monstrous lack-lustre eyes, like lamps of death,
glared at him in the moon; all else was dark, except the fiery crests of
the black mountain-billows, tumbling and raging all around.

What a night!

But, before morning, the breeze sank, the moon set, and a sombre quiet
succeeded, with only that grim figure in outline dimly visible. Owing to
the motion still retained by the waves, it seemed to nod and rear, and
be ever preparing to rush upon him.

The sun rose glorious, on a lovely scene; the sky was a very mosaic of
colors sweet and vivid, and the tranquil, rippling sea, peach-colored to
the horizon, with lines of diamonds where the myriad ripples broke into
smiles.

Staines was asleep, exhausted. Soon the light awoke him, and he looked
up. What an incongruous picture met his eye: that heaven of color
all above and around, and right before him, like a devil stuck in
mid-heaven, that grinning corpse, whose fate foreshadowed his own.

But daylight is a great strengthener of the nerves; the figure no longer
appalled him--a man who had long learned to look with Science's calm
eye upon the dead. When the sea became like glass, an