asterly winds are the prevailing ones within the
tropics, as near the line as we supposed ourselves to be.

CHAPTER SIX.

THE CALM.

THE SECOND WATCH--AN EVIL OMEN--THE WHITE SHARK--A BREAKFAST LOST.

"All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon."

During the remainder of the day the wind continued fair, and we held on
our course, steering by the sun, and keeping a vigilant look-out in
every direction. But the night set in, and we had yet seen no
appearance of land, no speck in the distance which could be mistaken for
a sail, not even a wandering sea-bird or a school of flying-fish--
nothing to break the dead monotony of the briny waste we were
traversing. As I sat at the helm, taking my turn in sailing the boat,
and watched the sun go down, and saw the darkness gathering over the
sea, a feeling nearly akin to despair took possession of me. In vain I
strove to take an encouraging and hopeful view of our circumstances.
The time within which relief must come, in order to be effectual, was so
short, that I could not help feeling that the probabilities were
strongly against us. I could not shut my eyes to the fact, that
dangers, imminent and real, such as we had read and talked of, without
ever half realising or dreaming that they could one day fall to our own
lot, now pressed upon us, and threatened us close at hand. I knew that
those fearful tales of shipwreck and starvation, were only too true--
that men, lost at sea like ourselves, had pined day after day, without a
morsel of food or a drop of water, until they had escaped, in stupor or
delirium, all consciousness of suffering. And worse even than this--too
horrible to be thought or spoken of--I knew something of the dreadful
and disgusting expedients to prolong life, which have sometimes been
resorted to by famishing wretches. I had read how the pangs of hunger,
and the still fiercer torments of thirst, had seemed to work a dire
change even in kind and generous natures, making men wolfish, so that
they slew and fed upon each other. Now, all that was most revolting and
inhuman, in what I had heard or read of such things, rose vividly before
me, and I shuddered at the growing probability that experiences like
these might be reserved for us. "Why not for us," I thought, "as well
as for the many others, the records of whose terrible fate I have
perused with scarcely more emotio