ired as he was in a camlet jacket, black cloth breeches,
and a white shirt.

We halted at a little hatch-like trap-door a short way forward of the
bulkheads of the stern cabins. Back grasped the ring in the center of
the hatch, and easily lifted the thing, and laid open the hold.

"All's clear," said he, looking along the corridor. "Down with you,
Mr. Peploe." I peered into the abyss, as it seemed to me; the light
hereabouts was so dim that but little of it fell through the small
square of hatchway, and I could scarcely discern the outlines of the
cargo below. I put my legs over and sank, holding on with a first
voyager's grip to the coaming of the hatch; then, feeling the cargo
under my feet, I let go, and the instant I withdrew my hands, Back
popped the hatch on.

The blackness was awful. It affected me for some minutes like the want
of air. I thought I should smother, and could hardly hinder myself
from thrusting the hatch up for light, and for the comfort of my lungs.
Presently the sense of suffocation passed. The corridor was
uncarpeted; I heard the sounds of footsteps on the bare planks
overhead, and, never knowing but that at any moment somebody might come
into this lazarette, I very cautiously began to grope my way over the
cargo. I skinned my hands and my knees, and cut my small clothes
against all sorts of sharp edges in a very short time. I never could
have realized the like of such a blackness as I was here groping
through. The deepest midnight overhung by the electric cloud would be
as bright as dawn or twilight compared to it.

I carried, however, in my head the sketch Back had drawn of this
interior, and remembering that I had faced aft when my companion had
closed me down, I crawled in the direction in which I imagined the
casks and my stock of bread and wine lay; and to my great joy, after a
considerable bit of crawling and clawing about, during which I
repeatedly wounded myself, I touched a canvas bag, which I felt, and
found full of ship's bread, and on putting my hand out in another
direction, but close by where the bag was, I touched a number of
bottles. On this I felt around, carefully stroking the blackness with
my maimed hands, and discovered that I had crawled into a recess formed
by the stowage of a number of casks on their bilge; a little space was
left behind them and the ship's wall; it was the hiding-place Back had
indicated, and I sat down to breathe and think, and to collec