beautiful. As the sun disappeared in
ocean, up rose the full-orbed moon--crimson and magnified by surrounding
vapors--that to the practised eye portended future tempest, calm as the
ocean and the heavens then seemed.

The constellations, singularly distinct and splendid, had the power to
fix and fascinate my vision--never felt before--as they shone above me,
clear and crystalline as enthroned in space--judges, and spectators,
cold and pitiless as it seemed to me, in the strangeness and forlornness
of my condition--Arcturus, and the Ursas, great and little, and Lyra,
and the Corona Borealis, Berenice, and Hydra, and Cassiopea's chair;
these and many more. I marked them all with a calm scrutiny that belongs
to terror in some phases. The stars seemed mocking eyes that
night--smiling and safe in heaven--the moon, a cold and cruel enemy with
her vapory train, so grandly sailing across the cloudless heaven--so
careless of our fate--the wreck of a ruined world as many deem
her--veiling in light her inward desolation.

A faint and vapory comet lurked on the horizon--like a ghastly
messenger--scarcely discernible to the human eyes, yet vaguely ominous
and suggestive--a spirit-ship it might be--watching in silence to bear
away the souls of those lost at sea!

There was deep stillness--unbroken, save by the lapping and plashing
waters. Even the crooning hymns of the old negro woman had died away;
and the moans of the suffering child, and the sobs of the weary mother,
and the eager exclamations of Ada Greene (for such I learned was the
name of my young companion), were, for a season, lost alike in sleep.

Food had been distributed--prayer had been offered--all seemed favorable
so far to our preservation. We were on the track of voyage--the pathway
of ships--and the sea was tranquil as a summer lake; up to this point,
the arm of God had been extended over us almost visibly. Would He
forsake us now? I questioned thus, and yet I could not, dare not, hope
as others hoped!

The morning came; I woke, aroused by Salva's song, from troubled sleep;
and, as I rose to a sitting posture, a troop of sea-birds that had been
swooping overhead, fled with a fiend-like screaming.

The mother and child were already consuming their scant allowance of
food. Ada Greene was standing self-poised, swaying like a slender reed
with the motion of the raft, so as never to lose her balance, like a
young acrobat, with her folded arms, her floating hair, an