sper from the realm he might have left. "I shall
press my face against her bosom."

Another minute of a silence that I disdained to break; then he turned
and went up the ladder. The seamen and the master followed. The hatch
was clapped to and fastened, and we were left to the darkness and the
heavy air, and to a grim endurance of what could not be cured.

During those hours of thirst and torment I came indeed to know the man
who sat beside me. His hands were so fastened that he could not loosen
the cords, and there was no water for him to give me; but he could
and did bestow a higher alms,--the tenderness of a brother, the manly
sympathy of a soldier, the balm of the priest of God. I lay in silence,
and he spoke not often; but when he did so, there was that in the tone
of his voice--Another cycle of pain, and I awoke from a half swoon,
in which there was water to drink and no anguish, to hear him praying
beside me. He ceased to speak, and in the darkness I heard him draw his
breath hard and his great muscles crack. Suddenly there came a sharp
sound of breaking iron, and a low "Thank Thee, Lord!" Another moment,
and I felt his hands busy at the knotted cords. "I will have them off
thee in a twinkling, Ralph," he said, "thanks to Him who taught my hands
to war, and my arms to break in two a bow of steel." As he spoke, the
cords loosened beneath his fingers.

I raised my head and laid it on his knee, and he put his great arm, with
the broken chain dangling from it, around me, and, like a mother with a
babe, crooned me to sleep with the twenty-third psalm.

CHAPTER XXVI IN WHICH I AM BROUGHT TO TRIAL

MY lord came not again into the hold, and the untied cords and the
broken chain were not replaced. Morning and evening we were brought a
niggard allowance of bread and water; but the man who carried it bore
no light, and may not even have observed their absence. We saw no one in
authority. Hour by hour my wounds healed and my strength returned. If
it was a dark and noisome prison, if there were hunger and thirst and
inaction to be endured, if we knew not how near to us might be a death
of ignominy, yet the minister and I found the jewel in the head of the
toad; for in that time of pain and heaviness we became as David and
Jonathan.

At last some one came beside the brute who brought us food. A quiet
gentleman, with whitening hair and bright dark eyes, stood before us. He
had ordered the two men with him to leave op