ould not
add much to the chances of his being rescued from a watery grave. His
only hope lay in being picked up by some passing vessel; and, feeling
convinced of this, he made no effort to go one way or the other, but
suffered himself to be drifted about, along with the other waifs of the
wreck, whithersoever it pleased the winds or the currents of the ocean
to carry him.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

SNOWBALL AT SEA ON A HENCOOP.

For six days had Snowball been leading this sort of life, along with the
little Lalee,--subsisting partly on the sea-steeped biscuit found in the
barrel, and partly upon other provisions which had turned up among the
drift; while the precious water contained in the keg had hitherto kept
them from suffering the pangs of thirst.

During these six days he had never wholly surrendered himself up to
despair. It was not the first, by several times, for the old sea-cook
to have suffered shipwreck; nor was it his first time to be cast away in
mid-ocean. Once had he been blown overboard in a storm, and left
behind,--the ship, from the violence of the wind, having been unable to
tack round and return to his rescue. Being an excellent swimmer, he had
kept afloat, buffeting with the huge billows for nearly an hour. Of
course, in the end, he must have gone to the bottom, as the place where
the incident occurred was hundreds of miles from any land. But just as
he was on the point of giving in, a hencoop came drifting past, to which
he at once attached himself, and this being fortunately of sufficient
size to sustain his weight, hindered him from sinking.

Though he knew that the hencoop had been thrown out of the ship by some
of his comrades, after he had gone overboard, the ship herself was no
longer in sight; and the unlucky swimmer, notwithstanding the help given
him by the hencoop, must eventually have perished among the waves; but
the storm having subsided, and the wind suddenly changing into the
opposite quarter, the vessel was wafted back on her old track, and
passing within hail of Snowball, his comrades succeeded in rescuing him
from his perilous situation.

With the retrospect of such an experience,--and Snowball could look back
upon many such,--he was not the man to yield easily to despair. On the
contrary, he now acted as if he believed that there was still not only
some hope, but a considerable chance of being delivered from the dilemma
in which the late disaster of the _Pandora_ had p