or as most people, is most certain; yet even the most
perfect soon run up a long account. During our lives our sins are
forgotten, as is the time at which they were committed; but when death
is certain, or appears to be so, it is then that the memory becomes most
horribly perfect, and each item of our monstrous bill requires but a few
seconds to be read, and to be acknowledged as too correct. This is the
horror of death; this it is which makes the body struggle to retain the
soul, already pluming herself and rustling her wings, impatient for her
flight. This it is which constitutes the pang of separation, as the
enfeebled body gradually relaxes its hold, and--all is over, at least on
this side of the grave.

Newton's strength was exhausted; his eyes were fixed on the clear blue
sky, as if to bid it farewell; and, resigned to his fate, he was about
to give over the last few painful efforts, which he was aware could only
prolong, not save his life, when he received a blow on his shoulder
under the water. Imagining that it proceeded from the tail of a shark,
or of some other of the ravenous monsters of the deep, which abound
among these islands, and that the next moment his body would be severed
in half, he uttered a faint cry at the accumulated horror of his death;
but the next moment his legs were swung round by the current, and he
perceived, to his astonishment, that he was aground upon one of the
sand-banks which abounded on the reef, and over which the tide was
running with the velocity of a sluice. He floundered, then rose, and
found himself in about one foot of water. The ebb-tide was nearly
finished, and this was one of the banks which never showed itself above
water, except during the full and change of the moon. It was now about
nine o'clock in the morning, and the sun shone with great power.
Newton, faint from want of sustenance, hardly knew whether to consider
this temporary respite as an advantage. He knew that the tide would
soon flow again, and felt that his strength was too much spent to enable
him to swim back to the islet which he had missed when he had attempted
to reach it, and which was more than two miles from the bank upon which
he then stood. What chance had he then but to be swept away by the
return of the tide? He almost regretted that it had not been a shark
instead of the sand-bank which had struck him; he would then have been
spared a few hours of protracted misery.

As Newton had fo