deeps of his being his ancestors had quickened and
stirred with dim memories of tips received in former lives.

"Thank you, sir," he said, very gratefully and very humbly indeed.

Precisely in the way that the door slid back, he slid aside, and I
stepped out on deck. I was still weak from my prolonged immersion. A
puff of wind caught me,--and I staggered across the moving deck to a
corner of the cabin, to which I clung for support. The schooner, heeled
over far out from the perpendicular, was bowing and plunging into the
long Pacific roll. If she were heading south-west as Johnson had said,
the wind, then, I calculated, was blowing nearly from the south. The fog
was gone, and in its place the sun sparkled crisply on the surface of the
water, I turned to the east, where I knew California must lie, but could
see nothing save low-lying fog-banks--the same fog, doubtless, that had
brought about the disaster to the _Martinez_ and placed me in my present
situation. To the north, and not far away, a group of naked rocks thrust
above the sea, on one of which I could distinguish a lighthouse. In the
south-west, and almost in our course, I saw the pyramidal loom of some
vessel's sails.

Having completed my survey of the horizon, I turned to my more immediate
surroundings. My first thought was that a man who had come through a
collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I
received. Beyond a sailor at the wheel who stared curiously across the
top of the cabin, I attracted no notice whatever.

Everybody seemed interested in what was going on amid ships. There, on a
hatch, a large man was lying on his back. He was fully clothed, though
his shirt was ripped open in front. Nothing was to be seen of his chest,
however, for it was covered with a mass of black hair, in appearance like
the furry coat of a dog. His face and neck were hidden beneath a black
beard, intershot with grey, which would have been stiff and bushy had it
not been limp and draggled and dripping with water. His eyes were
closed, and he was apparently unconscious; but his mouth was wide open,
his breast, heaving as though from suffocation as he laboured noisily for
breath. A sailor, from time to time and quite methodically, as a matter
of routine, dropped a canvas bucket into the ocean at the end of a rope,
hauled it in hand under hand, and sluiced its contents over the prostrate
man.

Pacing back and forth the length of the