on board, and
by the most extraordinary efforts lifted the whole remainder of the
head high enough to make sail and stand off to sea. The wind was off the
land, the water smooth, and no swell on, so we took no damage from that
tremendous weight surging by our side, though, had the worst come to the
worst, we could have cut it adrift.

When morning dawned we hove-to, the land being only dimly visible
astern, and finished taking on board our "head matter" without further
incident. The danger past, we were all well pleased that the captain was
below, for the work proceeded quite pleasantly under the genial rule of
the mate. Since leaving port we had not felt so comfortable, the work,
with all its disagreeables, seeming as nothing now that we could do it
without fear and trembling. Alas for poor Jemmy!--as we always persisted
in calling him from inability to pronounce his proper name--his case
was evidently hopeless. His fellows did their poor best to comfort his
fast-fleeting hours, one after another murmuring to him the prayers of
the Church, which, although they did not understand them, they evidently
believed most firmly to have some marvellous power to open the gates
of paradise and cleanse the sinner. Notwithstanding the grim fact
that their worship was almost pure superstition, it was far more in
accordance with the fitness of things for a dying man's surroundings
than such scenes as I have witnessed in the forecastles of merchant
ships when poor sailors lay a-dying. I remember well once, when I was
second officer of a large passenger ship, going in the forecastle as
she lay at anchor at St. Helena, to see a sick man. Half the crew were
drunk, and the beastly kennel in which they lived was in a thick fog of
tobacco-smoke and the stale stench of rum. Ribald songs, quarrelling,
and blasphemy made a veritable pandemonium of the place. I passed
quietly through it to the sick man's bunk, and found him--dead! He had
passed away in the midst of that, but the horror of it did not seem to
impress his bemused shipmates much.

Here, at any rate, there was quiet and decorum, while all that could
be done for the poor sufferer (not much, from ignorance of how he was
injured) was done. He was released from his pain in the afternoon of the
second day after the accident, the end coming suddenly and peacefully.
The same evening, at sunset, the body, neatly sewn up in canvas, with a
big lump of sandstone secured to the feet, was broug