eyes.

By and by, whether his body's eye saw the grim skeleton, or his mind's
eye the juicy fruits, green meadows, and pearly brooks, all was shadowy.

So, in a placid calm, beneath a blue sky, the raft drifted dead, with
its dead freight, upon the glassy purple, and he drifted, too, towards
the world unknown.

There came across the waters to that dismal raft a thing none too
common, by sea or land--a good man.

He was tall, stalwart, bronzed, and had hair like snow, before his time,
for he had known trouble. He commanded a merchant steamer, bound for
Calcutta, on the old route.

The man at the mast-head descried a floating wreck, and hailed the
deck accordingly. The captain altered his course without one moment's
hesitation, and brought up alongside, lowered a boat, and brought the
dead, and the breathing man, on board.

A young middy lifted Staines in his arms from the wreck to the boat; he
whose person I described in chapter one weighed now no more than that.

Men are not always rougher than women. Their strength and nerve enable
them now and then to be gentler than buttery-fingered angels, who drop
frail things through sensitive agitation, and break them. These rough
men saw Staines was hovering between life and death, and they handled
him like a thing the ebbing life might be shaken out of in a moment. It
was pretty to see how gingerly the sailors carried the sinking man up
the ladder, and one fetched swabs, and the others laid him down softly
on them at their captain's feet.

"Well done, men," said he. "Poor fellow! Pray Heaven, we may not have
come too late. Now stand aloof a bit. Send the surgeon aft."

The surgeon came, and looked, and felt the heart. He shook his head, and
called for brandy. He had Staines's head raised, and got half a spoonful
of diluted brandy down his throat. But there was an ominous gurgling.

After several such attempts at intervals, he said plainly the man's life
could not be saved by ordinary means.

"Then try extraordinary," said the captain. "My orders are that he is to
be saved. There is life in him. You have only got to keep it there. He
MUST be saved; he SHALL be saved."

"I should like to try Dr. Staines's remedy," said the surgeon.

"Try it, then what is it?"

"A bath of beef-tea. Dr. Staines says he applied it to a starved
child--in the Lancet."

"Take a hundred-weight of beef, and boil it in the coppers."

Thus encouraged, the surgeon went to the cook, and ve